Life without plastic B2
Taina Uitto’s personal quest started small, kept growing
VANCOUVER — The early days of Taina Uitto’s life without plastic weren’t easy.
“The first time I went shopping at the grocery store it was really hard,” she recalled. “I came out with an apple, only because I didn’t want to come out with nothing. Even that had a plastic sticker on it.”
Now, three years into her self-imposed year without plastic, there is no going back. “I just feel so much better without the weight of all that waste and all the toxins that plastic leaches into our water and our food and even the chemicals in the soaps and cosmetics,” said Uitto, a marine conservationist.
Some of her solutions are a little unappetizing: “Choose a toothbrush with natural bristles and a biodegradable handle. Mine is boar bristles and bone (the wet pig taste goes away in time).”
But many others are easy personal fixes to address the mounting global plastic pollution crisis.
Uitto began her quest while she was working with SeaChoice, the David Suzuki Foundation’s sustainable seafood certification program. She viewed a presentation by the research and advocacy group 5 Gyres on the massive plastic garbage patches that have accumulated in the world’s oceans.
“That really shocked me,” she said. “It literally broke my heart.”
The Great Pacific garbage patch is a collection of plastic debris spread over an area between Japan and California, a confetti of degrading plastic bits concentrated by the ocean’s natural currents. It is one of five such pollution gyres in the world’s oceans.
A recent analysis from the University of Oregon also notes that the ocean floor near populated areas is covered with sunken plastics. “Even though I didn’t do anything about it for a long time it stuck in my mind,” she recalled. “At that point I didn’t own a tiffin, never brought a cup to the coffee shop — I was just having a normal life.”
But images of water samples full of decaying material and albatrosses with their stomachs bulging with garbage seemed to be everywhere. The nauseating sight of seaborne junk and dead birds gnawed at Uitto’s mind until one day, she snapped.
On Jan. 1,2010, Uittopurged the plastics from her kitchen and bathroom. “I wanted to start with a clean slate and force myself to come up with alternatives and second, I wanted to get rid of the toxic things that live in plastic, like personal care products and cleaning products.”
Uitto started with a single Rubbermaid bin to collect the bottles, brushes, containers and other products, but filled it after clearing out just one drawer.
By the time she was done, her front room was waistdeep in food packaging, personal care products, garbage bags and various gadgets, tubs and containers. “It was pretty intense,” she said. “I challenged six other families to quit plastic as well and they all said the same thing: They weren’t aware of how much plastic they had and they had all felt like they were already eco-consumers.”
Matthew Stewart and his girlfriend Sarah Milton took the challenge and filled six boxes when they purged their home.
“It was a drastic change in lifestyle,” said Stewart. “Where we used to go to the store and buy things like almond milk, we just started making them ourselves. We spent a lot of time in the kitchen together, it was really kind of romantic.”
Uitto has chronicled her journey and those of her families in a still-unfinished documentary film and in her blog, Plastic Manners.
“People always say they don’t use that much plastic, but until you collect it even for a week and pull all the plastic from your kitchen, you don’t know,” she said. “It’s a shocking exercise.”
Uitto’s kitchen and bathroom shelves look cleaner and far more spacious after the purge, or “sophisticated,” as she put it.
Many of the cosmetics, cleansers and shampoos she seldom used and really doesn’t miss. Except mascara. “I was one of those women that felt naked without mascara. But I had to stop wearing makeup,” she said. “The benefit of that is that I can rub my eyes whenever I want.
“I had to simplify my personal care routine ... a lot,” she explained. “Finding a deodorant was hard, but now I have my little collection of things that work for me. I have five things instead of 500 things in the bathroom.”
The lowest hanging fruit on the plastic tree is the plastic shopping bag, according to Uitto. They are easily replaced with relatively benign cloth bags. “Now when I touch a plastic bag — if someone leaves one at my house — it’s a weird object and I think it smells bad.”
Slightly more challenging and insidious are produce bags. Watching people load their cloth shopping bags with plastic produce bags is an especially tragic irony to Uitto. Ditto for plastic bags in the bulk aisle.
She uses paper bags supplied for mushrooms to bag all her produce and dry bulk items, or she brings her own paper bags, dried and reused for as long as possible.
Uitto and her boyfriend Nino Kinmont are living plastic-free, but it is very much a life on the fringes of society. As though to prove the point, they are building a cabin on Denman Island with the intention of living “off the grid.”
Uitto has already lost one boyfriend as a result of her quest to live without plastic.
“When I came home with this idea he thought it was the ‘worst thing ever,’” she said. “Those were his words.”
When he left, he told her that life without plastic put a strain on their relationship.
“There is some doing without — nearly everything in the centre aisles of the grocery store is off-limits,” she said. “I had to relearn to cook from scratch and I thought I was a pretty good cook. But really I was a pretty good warmer of food. That was a shock.”
A conventional supermarket is a hostile environment. Local butchers, produce markets and bulk food stores make a plastic-free life easier.
The quest for plastic-free tofu was a case in point for Uitto.
“You have to find that store that sells in bulk and will accept your own container and it’s kind of a pain in the ass, to be honest,” she said. “But eventually you start to get really turned off by packaged processed foods, even things that you were really into.”