What Inspired Me To Deplasticize My Life

I have always considered myself to be a relatively conservative consumer of plastic. I bought what I needed, tried not to buy too much that I didn't need, and recycled when I could. After this point, I didn't think much about the millions of pieces of plastic sold, used, and discarded everyday. All this began to change last year when I visited a beach in south Florida. While this was in many ways a beautiful beach, in a very upscale area, every few feet the sand was littered with plastic garbage that had washed up on shore. There were pieces of plastic silverware, little plastic ketchup packets, pieces of toys, combs, and every other conceivable plastic trash one can imagine. As I often do when walking, I stopped to pick up the litter, thinking that I would leave the beach a better place. I soon realized the impossibility of my good deed. When I looked closely at the sand, I was horror struck. The sand was full of minuscule plastic bits--millions of tiny pieces of blue, green and red plastic. So many pieces that they could never be cleaned up in a thousand years.

When I returned from vacation to my home state of Michigan, I redoubled my recycling efforts. I was still so innocent... I was blind to the fact that almost all of the new plastic I was buying was made from 100 percent virgin plastic. My shampoo bottle was not reincarnating as my lotion bottle. Since there are no mandates requiring manufacturers to use post-consumer plastic in their products, why would they? It's cheaper to use virgin plastic. Taking my plastics to the municipal recycling center was much better than chucking them into the garbage, but it is not a guilt free license to consume new plastic.

What happens to my recycling? Some of the plastic might be made into new containers by environmentally conscious companies (these are the minority). Some of the plastic might be made into polar fleece or synthetic decking, slowing, but not stopping, the inexorable march to the landfill. The worst case scenario is that my batch of recycling wouldn't find a buyer to process it and would go to a landfill, or it would become contaminated by non-recyclable plastic and end up in a landfill. Either way, I had done nothing to curb the tide of dirt cheap, plastic goods that flood every nook and cranny of America.

Plastic junk, bought cheap, thrown away or tossed on the ground without a thought. It keeps arriving in our stores by the truckload. Keep buying it and we feed the industry. Say no and maybe the industry will reexamine their poisonous packaging.