Recently, I have been pondering on whether it would be possible to eliminate plastic from our lives. Alas, I have to concede that complete elimination seems impossible, so, for now, I'll settle for a full-scale reduction. It has been a busy fortnight for me, with visitors, and William starting school, but I've found myself thinking hard about the different areas of our lives where we are consuming plastic and feel I am poised to take a plunge into a radical change, even if it is executed in a bit-by-bit manner.
For a while, I have already been working on a couple of areas, such as toiletries and toys. I always hated loads of plastic bottles lying around in the bathroom - ugly, ugly, ugly - in part, due to a desire for a more natural way of caring for my skin/body/hair and that of the children, and also, in part, due to a general cynicism about the way a small number of very large corporations would like us to believe we need all these things just to stay alive in the modern world. So, paring down in that area has been relatively easy, and I'm fizzing with ideas about making our own soap, ditching shampoo for baking soda and maybe changing to henna and indigo for colouring my hair. (More on these coming soon....)
I've started having conversations with William about plastic toys, especially battery-operated ones. To get him used to the idea, make it a family philosophy. I have rarely, if ever, bought new plastic toys for him, preferring natural materials, and, for heaven's sake, normal, everyday objects that a child would find interesting. (Do they really need toys? An argument for another day, perhaps.) I do buy second-hand toys, and inevitably, more of these are plastic. I have several leftover from my own childhood, which, in a way, is a particularly nice form of recycling and I probably won't part with these in a hurry.
But, a somewhat larger challenge that we are to face is in the kitchen. And I don't mean cling film and sandwich bags, because we hardly ever use those. I mean this:
This is an example of how slack (aka 'convenience') things have gotten in the grocery aisle. This particular supermarket seems to have a lot of prepackaged items, and, for the purposes of this blog, this illustration is slightly exceptional for us. We buy loose where possible, but if we order in, there is an even larger mountain of plastic to wade through before we find the carrot at the bottom. Cucumber doesn't need to be shrink-wrapped! Why not use punnets made of card or other compostable material for the soft fruits? Actually, the bag containing carrots, in this case, is compostable, but nothing else is. And, why, oh why are so many different types of plastic used - LDPE, PET, PP, HDPE, polystyrene, and other unidentifiable materials - making recycling so difficult? We are currently only able to put HDPE into our doorstep recycling. My angry side wants to just take it all, after saving it up for several months of course, and dump it on the supermarket forecourt! So, our purchasing strategies are going to take a turn for the better, more socially responsible and community-spirited as we support more local small businesses and direct ourselves into a new way of feeding ourselves. (NB This is all while the allotment is in a more, er, quiescent phase during Aruna's first year.)
Some well-timed inspiration came recently when I came across the blog of another family who have already taken that plunge.
Ultimately, a huge amount of plastic ends up floating in the oceans' gyres as ever-shrinking particulate matter, entering the food chain at the lowest levels, and, ultimately, our own bodies, higher up. So, what we thought we threw away.... I am of the mindset that it should be difficult, a privilege, to get extra packaging like this, but sadly, it is the opposite - unwanted, wasteful and will contribute to a global legacy that will haunt us, I'm sure, for decades to come.
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