What I learned about a plastic-free life

It's practically impossible to avoid plastic without great effort. I think even if we collectively don't do much towards that goal, each of us should think about it while we go about our daily lives.

For instance, there are times where the choice is wholly ours. Eggs, for instance, often come in plastic or cardboard, so aside from taking a few extra seconds to consider the kind of eggs we want, that's easy. If we want yogurt, though, we basically have little choice beyond considering the packaging that wastes the least plastic.

But there's still so much we can do. When we know that a store puts plastic utensils in an order without asking, and/or gives us our purchase in a plastic bag, it's simple to ask them for neither. It's also simple to carry a reusable bag or two, or a travel mug, et cetera.

Spending just a little energy can easily reduce default plastic use quite a lot. This story is a good reminder that perfect should never be the enemy of good, so at very least we should try where we can.

It’s a bit ridiculous that we’ve built a system to motivate change by distributing money, and that system fails flat when it comes to plastic use. In a healthy society, avoiding plastic would be both cheaper and more convenient.

If we charged companies the true cost of plastics we'd have a perfectly adequate biodegradable alternatives by now

Having toddlers I've thrown out multiple larger plastic items over the years - think things like diaper bins and stools. I now look towards the plastic slide they've since grown out of and feel only despair. For some items there are opportunities for donation, but everything else gets walked down to our building's trash room and I fucking hate it. Companies who bring such items into the world should bear some of the responsibility for their disposal and certainly shouldn't get to walk away as they currently do.

We have done a lot of work trying to price the societal cost of carbon emissions into the cost of doing business... Why haven't we done the same with things like plastic waste?

Few practical observations:

- plastic packaging, single use plastic stuff, tend to be mostly needed in cities and cities only. That's simply because in dense cities people keep moving from residential buildings (used less than half a day), to other buildings (offices, commerce etc, also used for less than half a day in mean), in a continuous very short-range commuting, getting continuous non-block-able ads (shop windows), so they tend to eat on the go, buy small stuff they have to carry around etc, also smaller residential emplacements demand small stock at home of anything, so more packaging;

- plastic it's not only packaging, large slice of tissues are plastics, menstruation related products are plastic, electricity cables insulation is plastic, windows joint, many plumbing materials, cars tires and many cars elements, ... are all plastic of some kind.

So to say: we can't being plastic free on scale, simply because when we was it was another era with less humans on earth and much more resources needed for personal wellbeing even if we have had much less back then. Yes, we can have natural fiber dresses, BUT not for anyone, we can make cars without plastics (almost) but they would be much more expensive and energy consuming and so on.

What we can do is AVOIDING living in dense cities, witch is appropriate for many reasons, also to reduce single use plastics. Cities are NOT green at all despite finance capitalism propaganda.

tl;dr: live like the (early) 19th century.

It's perplexing to see people jump on this stupid "anti-plastic" mentality bandwagon when they probably owe their entire existence to plastics and other advances in material sciences. Trying to reverse these changes will only lead to societal collapse, as somewhat hinted at in the article.

Everything will get recycled eventually, and the majority of plastics are inert --- which is why they're used in the first place. People in the future will surely find a way to use what's in landfills again.

Plus, I had to haul a heavy tote bag of containers everywhere.

Now you know why plastic replaced glass containers in a majority of applications --- and if you're worried about carbon emissions from shipping, all that extra weight and volume should make you ponder.

Plastics certainly is one of the most useful materials known to humans. It is incredibly versatile and cheap.

Any area of life has been significantly effected by the use of plastics as a material. I think articles like this are laughable, the plastic use of individuals in their daily lives is just a tiny, tiny peak of the iceberg. Beneath there sits an industrial society which could not exist without it. No, you can not live "plastic free".

The first and most important questions these people have to ask is: how do you make anything without plastics?