Headline: – Suburban Family of 4, living plastic free – IMPOSSIBLE. Unfortunately, that is our family’s collective conclusion after taking part in the Rodale.com February Plastic Free Challenge.
On the positive, it has opened our eyes to how dependent we
have become on plastic products and how pervasive plastic is in our daily lives. We have vowed as a family to start moving away from this dependence, one step at a time. We will replace our reusable plastic coffee mugs and water bottles with metal ones; we are reading more labels, on all types of products and trying to buy things with more natural ingredients and less things we can’t pronounce! We are looking forward to spring and farmers markets, buying in bulk and using glass, metal or fabric containers, not plastic bags. We will regularly ask the butcher, baker and fish manager in our local supermarket to wrap our things only in paper. We have collected some great tips from others on this plastic free quest and will start incorporating them into our lives. We will point out to our friends, classmates, colleagues and relatives, about the pervasiveness of plastic and why it is harmful – not only to our bodies but – to our environment and our atmosphere as well. We will take one positive step at a time and share our successes with each other.
On the negative, the amount of fossil fuels needed to support our global plastic addiction is mind-boggling. Not only are we poisoning our oceans, our bodies and our atmosphere with every piece of plastic we use, we are accelerating global climate change and putting our foot further down on the pedal as we race for a collision with our environment. The easiest thing to do is to shut our eyes…too big, too much information, too hard for us to do anything. But, not true. One step at a time. Join us and join the Plastic Pollution Coalition. Sign the “refuse” pledge. Try to ban single use plastics in your life. Ultimately, the oil we need to produce the plastic we have come to depend on, will be gone, but unfortunately every piece of plastic we have ever produced will still be with us.
Knowledge is power. We feel more powerful in our family than we did a week ago. Thanks Rodale! Because of your Challenge, we are on the move, one step at a time to reduce our family’s dependence on plastic!
Thanks for the info. First you set out to think about alternatives to conserve energy, and then you embark to think about substitute energy formulas. Generating power for your home, with substitute energy systems can seem fairly daunting, in case you do not know how the system works. While there are actually down sides for a few forms of renewable energy, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think about them.