Final Project: Disposable Plastic Use (Eric Pointer)

I’ll start off by saying that like most of you I was surprised to see how much disposable plastic I used on a daily basis.  However, unlike what I see many of you saying here, I was surprised at how small the amount was that I used over the course of two days.  Now this could be coincidence, and unfortunately I didn’t think to do this experiment while I was home over break, but I would like to think otherwise. 

Plastic Use

I had a total of four plastic grocery bags (the Wal-Mart bag has two others inside it), one zip-lock sandwich bag, and one plastic bag from some candy I happened to finish one of the two days.  This clearly isn’t a negligible amount, however I had expected it would be much more.

I grew up in a household where I was constantly taught, as far back as I can remember, to reuse as much as possible.  Everything from paper grocery bags, to plastic food containers, to plastic silverware, even the plastic bag the Sunday paper was delivered in.  Furthermore if you couldn’t reuse it, we seldom had it around.  Paper plates, for example, were almost never used around my house.  Now to some of you this may seem a bit harsh, but it was never like that.  I wouldn’t be scolded for using disposable items or anything like that.  I was really just taught by example. 

As much as possible I try to look for ways to reuse disposable items, especially plastic ones, at least once and I certainly recycle as much as possible.  Grocery bags are a great example.  Both paper and plastic grocery bags are great to use for trash bags.  Up at school here where Wal-Mart is my typical grocery location I get many plastic grocery bags that work well for lining small trash bins around the house.  This works well not only to keep my trash bins clean, but also because my trash collector won’t take anything that’s not bagged.  Reusing these grocery bags prevents me from having to buy other disposable plastic bags literally for the purpose of throwing them away.  Back home our kitchen trash is designed to hold a paper grocery bag.  We don’t put a bag in each trash bin at home, in order to reduce the use of unnecessary plastic, so paper grocery bags also work great to collect trash from each bin around the house on trash day.

Unfortunately I accumulate grocery bags much faster than I can reuse and dispose of them.  Luckily the plastic bags are recyclable at certain grocery stores, but this is definitely an area that I could reduce my use of disposable plastic.  The image below shows the [few] solutions I used to reduce my disposable plastic usage.  I don’t use plastic zip-lock bags often, but for the times that I do a reusable Tupperware container offers a sustainable alternative.  Grocery bags are my real issue.  The little black pouch happens to be a compact, reusable grocery bag that I got for free at a basketball game.  Using bags like these helps cut down on my use of disposable grocery bags.  I can definitely say it will take some time to get used to remembering to bring these bags when I go grocery shopping, but I'm sure it will become habit eventually.

Solutions