Two Days of Plastic - Geoffrey Muir

Geoffrey Muir
SS3300 Plastic-Free Blog

Day One: Monday, December 9^th, 2013

               Today is my first day.  I’m excited to try out this project.  I’m also a little scared to find out how bad of a plastic polluter I actually am.  I will be eating breakfast at home this morning, as I do every day.  Because I eat breakfast at home, I rarely have plastic garbage.  The typical breakfast plastics for me are bacon packages, or wrappers from a pack of bagels; however I only run into these every few days.  For lunch, I am using a plastic zip-lock baggie for my sandwich.  I carry a Nalgene water bottle everyday instead of wasting one use bottles.  Interestingly, my Nalgene is old enough that it is one of the “toxic” bottles.  It is awesome though, never had any issues and it is almost ten years old.  Consider that my plug for “Made in America” products; let the royalty checks start rolling.

               Lunch time.  I had a sweet tooth, so I grabbed a Snapple from the MUB.  I love Snapple because I enjoy tea and their products come in glass bottles.  There are plenty of good places on campus to recycle, and campus’ takes fairly good advantage of high-traffic areas.  I usually go home for dinner, which I eat with a number of my fraternity brothers.  We go through lots of everything. So we do our best with proper recycling practices.  We had some plastic from the dinner meal.

 Day Two: Tuesday, December 10^th, 2013

               Morning of day two.  It is the second day of the two day period in which I am studying my own habits.  This project has already enlightened me to be much more cautious when purchasing plastic products.  For breakfast, I again managed to use no plastic! Feels good! I used a Tupperware container for my lunch, so I could just wash it at home.  I refiled my water bottle, and off to school.  I bought some new sponges and some paper towels before class.  They did however come in a plastic wrapper, which I threw away.  I also bought a Red Bull Energy drink, which comes in a returnable can, so I was also able to recycle that.  On the drive home, I stopped at the gas station and picked up a pack of smokes.  Cigarettes come with a cellophane wrapper on them, and many people inadvertently litter with these.

               For dinner, there were lots of different wrappers from the foods we used. There were also a couple of empty milk jugs.  At my home we get all of our food in paper bags, no plastic.  We then later use the paper bags to start our wood-burning fireplace.  From this day forward I will try my best to use fewer plastic products, and to think responsibly when it comes to even the simplest of choices in life.