The everyday plastic - James Herman

This project made me think outside the box about plastic consumption. To start with, I thought that my pile of plastic was going to be basically nonexistent. It turns out that I use much more plastic that I thought.

 My biggest uses of disposable plastic were plastic bags. Four of the eleven items were plastic bags! This gave me some ideas for the two days of no disposable plastic items. To begin, instead of using a plastic bag at Jim’s grocery store I just carried the items home in my backpack. I only buy food for myself, and usually in low quantities, so I just told the cashier that I didn’t need a bag. However, this not only freaked out the friendly worker, one of the two times at Jim’s they completely forgot and put my food in the bag anyway! I had to politely take the contents out and hand the bag back. This just shows how foreign these concepts can be of recuing the amount of used plastic. I also realized that it’s common to put plastic bags inside plastic bags. This regularly happens when buying produce. But as long as you’re not buying 100 apples you can just keep them loose in your cart. In addition, I discovered that most days I end up throwing a sandwich inside a plastic Ziploc bag (because I’m too stingy to buy any food on campus) and just throwing it out. But this made me realize that there is nothing wrong with wrapping up my food in a paper towel. Here are the step-by-step picture instructions incase you want to try, its pretty hard.

Later on, while eating at Jimmy Johns I asked for a cup for water (because I’m too stingy to buy a soda), and realized that the cup that the sandwich artist was going to hand me was made of disposable plastic. That’s when I remembered that sitting in my backpack was my glass re-usable water bottle. I denied the plastic cup and just filled up my water bottle at the drink dispenser, and resisted the temptation to steal soda. I also denied plastic drinking containers a few other times throughout the day but from plastic water bottles.

However, some disposable plastics aren’t avoidable unless extreme measures are taken in some cases. For example, shampoo is almost impossible to find in non-plastic containers. I just got lucky enough that in my two days of no disposable plastic I didn’t empty another bottle! I quite literally don’t think you can buy shampoo in any other type of bottle nowadays. This is just one of plenty of products that us consumers have become so accustom to receiving in plastic that we don’t think twice before we buy it, empty its contents, and toss it away. There is almost no alternative. In the meantime, we are thoughtlessly contaminating ourselves with the harmful chemicals found in these plastics. It’s going take a lot of people to care a lot about reducing disposable plastics in order to resolve this issue. However, where there’s a will there’s a way.

- James Herman