Plastic free: Day Two
Plastic Free: Day 2
Today was the first day I am mindful that I did not bring in any new plastic into the house or use any plastic (other than my debit card, I guess) out of the house. I used the debit card to pay for my son’s guitar lessons, and I’m pretty sure I can’t live without that kind of plastic.
Which raises the question, what kind of plastic do we need and what kind of plastic do we want?
- Debit and credit cards make a lot of sense and are long lasting. Cash is an alternative but not always a safe and sensible one, plus Amazon doesn’t make it easy to send cash.
- There are durable medical supplies, including life-saving implants, that we wouldn’t want to get rid of.
- Plastic is the best way to transport and store cleaning and beauty supplies, for example. You really wouldn’t want to drop a glass shampoo bottle in the shower and be left standing, naked, among the shards while soap streams into your eyes.
- The bottles we use for laundry detergent are among the most durably designed products in the world. That’s why the Pacific Garbage Patch is filled with them. They should be reusable for decades, but that isn’t how the system is designed. I’ve switched to the pods made by an environmentally friendly alternative to the meme-worthy P&G product. Another alternative is laundry powder in a cardboard box.
The purpose of this exercise isn’t necessarily to end all plastic usage forever. The idea is to spark mindfulness about what I bring into my life and what I dispose of, and to dream of systems that might minimize our reliance on non-recyclable, non-biodegradable products.
