A Week Without Plastic - Day 7

I am feeling pretty good about the challenge. I still have the rest of today to go but so far I've bought nothing that is made of plastic or primarily plastic. My only plastic purchases have been things from the grocery with plastic packaging. Not bad. My friend in Japan says that it's even more difficult there to avoid plastic since packaging is even more over the top. Which gets me to the topic of this post.

During this week of no plastic I had to refill my statin prescription. And as usual it looks like this:

For some reason Kaiser puts it in a bottle five or more times larger in capacity than necessary. I'm sure plastic has been great for the pharmaceutical industry as these bottles keep drugs dry and usually whole. But is it necessary? These little pills are really hard, I can't imagine they'd suffer from just being placed in a paper or cardboard box or envelope. Hell, I've spent many hours at a rave with 3 hits of ecstasy rolling around loose in my pocket and they survived. I'm pretty sure they weren't made with the kind of equipment Lily etc. so surely pills are sturdy enough to survive less packaging.

Kailua Beach Broke My Heart

Two years ago I went with Jerry to his home town, Kailua, for the first time. It was my first time on Oahu and I fell in love immediately, especially seeing it through the eyes of a home-town boy. We stayed at an AirBnB one house back from Kailua Beach so I went to the beach every day. Kailua Beach is regularly voted best beach in the world because of the miles of soft sand, beautiful blue water, usually without too strong of a surf and views of the gorgeous Ko'olau Mountains.  We got engaged on that beach on that trip so it's very special to me. But what is as memorable to me is how shocked I was to have to walk through swaths of decaying plastic bits to get down to the water. On that trip, maybe because of a recent storm, at the high-tide level there would be deposits two feet wide and five or more feet long - all just bits of different colored plastic.

On my last trip I made a video of it. This time I didn't find those huge collections but there was still plastic all along the beach and I know that plastic will be back with the next big storm.

A Week Without Plastic

So the Less Plastic people posted about this Facebook challenge to go a week without buying any plastic. The week started yesterday, 4/23, and I did great that day. However, here it is mid-day of day two and I've failed. I just came back from the grocery store and because I bought ham and cheese at the deli counter I ended up with these pieces of plastic.

There is a win here. I completely forgot about the deli using plastic sheets for sliced meat but when I went to the butcher counter I was all prepared to ask them to not use a piece of plastic for handling my beef. But before I could get the words out the guy grabbed a piece of paper which you can see at the top of the picture. It's made a lovely addition to my compost bin.

Grocery stores are murder for this challenge. I did mange to buy food for three meals with only that small amount of plastic. I suppose had I been more on top of it I could have skipped the cheese this week (which seems silly) and asked the woman at the deli to slice into the butcher paper they wrap with. Lesson learned.

And Now for Some Thoughts on Yogurt

What? Surely he can't be against yogurt, everyone loves yogurt. But I ask you to do this. Next time you're in a grocery store, wander over to dairy and take a look at the yogurt section and ponder the fate of our environment.

There's like ten million yogurts in every store in America. Well, at least the ones I know. That's a lot of pieces of plastic guaranteed for a single use. I can't think of a time I've seen somebody using a Chobani cup for anything. And yes, I'm sure one of you is thinking "Um, my aunt is a watercolorist and she uses them for washing her brushes" but that's one Aunt. And how many watercolorist's brushes are there to wash vs. the wall of yogurt containers at your local Safeway?

I like yogurt, you know this blog is mostly about self-shame. I don't buy it often but it's only because I buy it and then it sits in the fridge until I guilt-eat it all in one day because it's been in there for three weeks. But this isn't about my neurosis. The point is yogurt is yummy and arguably good for you so maybe this is one of those cases where we just have to accept we're going to add some plastic to the waste stream in the name of a better life for ourselves. And that has to be OK to some degree. We accept it for toothpaste and Clarins eye cream. So yogurt is fine too, right?

I had a roommate who ate yogurt every single morning of her life. And she rinsed the container out and left it in the sink. But this isn't about my dreams of murder. It's about 365 pieces of intentional waste per year. And maybe that's ok. Maybe that's the amount of plastic waste it takes to live the life you like. I don't know the answer. I'm not sure there is an answer or if an answer is even the point. (How zen of me.) I guess the point is are we aware of our choice? Or we even making a choice? Or, are we blindly (mindlessly) dumping plastic.

I wish I could say just stop, here's an alternative. And you'd think that by now there would be a feminist dairy collective making yogurt and hitting all of the farmers markets to sell their yogurt bulk-style, ladling it into your carefully washed crock that you brought with you- like the growler approach to beer but for yogurt. And that might actually fly here in the bay area, but I can't see it happening broadly. And what happened before plastic? I guess everyone who ate yogurt made it themselves at home and I'm not about to try to convince anyone that's a great plan. Though you could probably do it in that pickling setup you got a few years ago at the office holiday party. No, there isn't really an option I can think of.

So is this a carbon offset kind of thing? Maybe if we want to eat yogurt every day or a whole bunch we have to agree we'll never use a plastic bag or a roll of saran wrap and we'll only buy bamboo toothbrushes. (Oh I've got my eyes on you, Philips Sonicare, you demon of feeling clean.) Like I said, I don't have an answer here. And maybe that's why I get so uneasy in the dairy section.