A Week Without Plastic

08/03/2009

A Week Without Plastic

Katherine Sharpe

A little while back, I was talking to ReadyMade editor Andrew Wagner about story ideas and blog ideas, and I mentioned how I'd been thinking it would be an interesting experiment to try to live without plastic for a while and write about it. Andrew liked the idea pretty much immediately, and started envisioning "A Week Without..." as a recurring ReadyMade blog feature. In the meantime, he bade me to live out my dream, trying to live plastic-free for a week and reporting daily on my progress (or lack thereof).

Part One: The Backstory

For a stretch of time when I was 12 or 13 I used to hoard plastic bottles in my bedroom. It isn't that I collected them or sought them out, just that I couldn't bear to throw away the ones that did cross my path. Early-90s environmentalism was in full swing, and visions of burning rainforests and landfills danced in my pre-teen head.

Once the idea that plastic was a material that didn’t biodegrade, ever—that every TCBY cup and school-lunch spork and film canister would be around basically for the rest of time—suggested itself to me, I had a hard time just tossing things out like a normal person (this was before my town implemented curbside recycling for plastics). So I’d carefully rinse and save my plastic empties until the clutter became so overwhelming that I had no choice but to throw things away.

Somehow it was easier to do so all at once, in a berserker frenzy. The guilt was intense but it was over fast, the proverbial tearing-off-the-Band-Aid-quickly approach to my ecological problem. My issues with plastic have waxed and waned over the years. I no longer feel compelled to save up what I can’t recycle, and it’s easy enough to fall into a rhythm of life in which plastic utensils and plastic-lidded coffee cups and plastic-wrapped meats from the supermarket seem normal and don’t inspire any thoughts of ecological disaster (or thoughts of anything—they become the most mute and ordinary building blocks of our daily lives). But once in a while, something catches me and I’m right back to feeling the old ways again—sickened, powerless, guilty.

The plastic “clamshell” containers used for take-out salads at the deli are some sort of personal trigger. And every now and then I run across a stunningly depressing photograph or other document of our plastic waste problem, like Chris Jordan's incredible photographs of American mass consumption, or this 60 Minutes segment on e-waste. The inefficiency and the waste and the fact that these banal objects are never going to go disappear, that they’re just going to turn from new and clean to crappy and brittle—it’s still pretty breathtaking in its power to make me feel depressed.

Like a lot of people who try to take into account how their personal choices around consumption affect the environment, I often find that I have questions. Many of them are about plastic, and sometimes the answers are frustratingly elusive (or is it just that finding them out is never at the tippy top of my to-do list?) Why can’t I recycle plastic yogurt tubs? What’s bio-plastic, and is it actually better? Does the plastic that I recycle really get used for new things? Why is everything shrink-wrapped? Is plastic ever, as you sometimes hear, the more eco-friendly choice?

So on the premise that the best way to understand the role of something in one’s life—be it a person, a drug, a possible food allergen, or a miracle material-cum-ecological scourge—is to go without it for a while, I decided to embark on my week without plastic. Each day, I’ll report on my progress and my slip-ups. I’ll also compile a list of questions for further research, and if I accomplish any further research, I’ll report on that too. Below: Chris Jordan's photograph of two million plastic bottles, the number used in the United States every five minutes, followed by two increasingly zoomed-in detail shots. Via the Brooklyn Skeptic.