A day without plastic

Today is Earth Day. For the past few years we have been encouraged to turn off our lights for one hour “in solidarity with global efforts to secure nature and our home.”

I’m not knocking it; it’s just so puny. How about turning off all the power? We often do it involuntarily for way more than an hour and Earth Day is the furthest thing from our mind.

How about going for a day without plastic? Oh me nerves about plastic!

I was looking up Earth Day and here are just a few things I read from the official Earth Day site:

• 100 BILLION plastic bags are used by Americans every year. Tied together, they would reach around the Earth’s equator 773 times!

• 8 MILLION METRIC TONS of plastic wind up in our oceans each year. That’s enough trash to cover every foot of coastline around the world with five full trash bags of plastic…in ONE YEAR!

• Every day in the US, over 500,000,000 straws are used once and thrown away.

I didn’t think I was doing too badly; I recycle. I have cloth shopping bags (but somehow eventually end up with a plastic bag stuffed full of plastic bags and I dutifully take them back to the grocery store recycle bin).

My righteousness has been replaced by horror. “Ninety-one per cent of plastic waste isn’t recycled. And since most plastics don’t biodegrade in any meaningful sense, all that plastic waste could exist for hundreds or even thousands of years.”

So far today I have taken pills from plastic containers, used a plastic tooth brush, used detergent in a plastic container, eaten something from plastic wrap and drunk water from a plastic thermal mug.

The mug is ok; I’ve been using it for years. The pill bottles should be refilled. We should use the same toothbrush handle for years and just replace the bristles. None of it has to be plastic.

How stunned we human beings are. We had so much right and then made it wrong in the name of progress, efficiency and the almighty dollar.

We used to wash out milk bottles and put them on the front step with paper tickets and get fresh full ones. We used to buy cheese from a block, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string, and put it in a big brown paper grocery bag along with the meat that was wrapped in waxed brown paper and the oranges we picked out of a wooden crate just like the one you had in your bedroom, turned on end with a pretty cover that made a perfect bedside table with two hidden shelves.

Ok maybe I didn’t do all that stuff, but I remember it being done, and I don’t remember much going to waste when I was a child.

So here is my brain wave; repurposing plastic containers could/should be a new industry. Notice I didn’t say recycling. Repurposing means you adapt the item for another use altogether and automatically lessen the need for manufacturing more stuff.

Google “repurposing plastic containers” and I guarantee you your mind will be boggled.

I’m not going to do most of the suggestions, especially the ones that involve being crafty, but some are as simple as cutting a hole in a peanut butter jar or a pop bottle and making a birdfeeder instead of buying one of those plastic feeders that won’t last long anyway.

I am an advocate against plastic, but I am so conflicted. One hint was “try making your pie from scratch to avoid plastic packaging.” I don’t want to give up my store-bought ham-andhavarti quiche for breakfast, but I could ask them to use less packaging. I don’t want to crochet with plastic bags, but I’d gladly save them for someone who did, and I think buying drinking water in plastic bottles is ridiculous.

Remember that iconic line to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate? “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Plastics. There is a great future in plastics.”

That was 1967. Now there is no future in plastics.

Happy Earth Day.