Plastic Free July is upon us! Rebecca Prince-Ruiz, founder of Plastic Free July, encourages people to take the challenge with friends, start small and keep a “plastic-free kit” on hand.
Just a reminder that just because you buy experiences or products that apparently are plastic free, that doesn’t mean that those companies are particularly concerned about being wasteful, so you can easily be incredibly wasteful indirectly.
For example in a flower store I worked at we flew roses in from Kenya and all kinds of other shenanigans you wouldn’t want to know, even though we were branded as green. Let’s just say I know how to pack and unpack a lot of stuff quickly.
Anybody on prescription meds need not apply. (I know, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, it’s just this is so impossible to be plastic-free in our current society as an individual.)
I fully believe that the warehouse I work in wastes more plastic in a week than every employee of the company that owns it combined will waste in their whole lives.
Plastic wrapped plastic pallets with plastic boxes, containing plastic wrapped items of plastic.
When the boxes come off the truck, the plastic wrap is removed, large boxes separated to small boxes. Then plastic wrapped again.
From there they go onto shelves, the second set of plastic wrap slowly comes off.
When they’re picked up to be moved, they’re plastic wrapped.
When they’re taken to shipping, they’re plastic wrapped.
When they finally go on the pallet that takes them to a store, they’re plastic wrapped.
They have two compactors, one is for plastic one is for cardboard, and the conpacted plastic gets tossed into the same huge shipping containers their regular trash goes into.
From my dealings with this warehouse, I do not believe they recycle anything, and that management actively opposes such things (because tHaTs WoKe)
It almost feels pointless to even try sometimes.
BUT the more people who try to go plastic free by choice, and put pressure on companies to reduce plastic use, the more likely change can happen.
But hey, I can’t control a multi billion dollar company, although I can sure try to limit my own waste at every opportunity.
Just throwing out ideas for how you could affect change if you so choose.
Seems to me you are in a position to provide an anonymous tip with images of the dumpster with compacted plastic in it to support the claim to an eco-friendly news outlet to name and shame them and put pressure on management to change.
Keep in mind precautions necessary to remain anonymous when providing any tip if you don’t want to be roped in on it. Maybe someone knows a resource for whistleblowers on safe disclosure?
I’ve tried so hard to go plastic free but absolutely fricking can’t; it’s everywhere and in everything. Even minimizing it continues to be a challenge. I refuse to give up, but I’ve had to lower my expectations considerably.
Like Transporter Room 3 said: our individual plastic usage is probably not even a drop in the bucket compared to the waste generated by industry. :sigh:
Bingo!
Plastic is in EVERYTHING.
This is one angle that nearly everyone doesn’t get. Pickup anything around you, plastic is there.
All the solar/wind power stuff - massive plastic consumers.
And where do we get plastic (polymers)? Oil.
We’re not getting away from oil anytime soon. If anything, we’ll see improved recycling of polymer bases and supplanting of oil-based polymers with organics where we can…when the tech gets there (which will happen as the economic pressure to do so increases).
People hate to hear it, but economic pressures are just a proxy for resources (with some politics thrown in).
