Reduce plastic waste :: PlasticLess.com

I’ve just finished reading a fascinating account of some personal direct action from a Canadian who is living and working in Morocco. Robbin Yager provides Tours and Treks in Morocco. One day she decided to roll up her sleeves and start clearing plastic trash out of some of the dry riverbeds in that country.

Here is a summary from her page on direct action:

Over the 10 years I’ve been living and working in Morocco, I’ve seen plastic grow from a few bags blowing across the Sahara, to clogged rivers and watersheds everywhere, from a few bags left by roadsides to huge dumps into ravines and gorges. In developing countries where information is not readily available to citizens, it can take governments a long time to develop solutions for problems. I believe people learn and are encouraged by example. Tourism is very important in Morocco. As a tourist anyone can make the problem seen and heard most easily by taking direct action. And I have to add, it feels so very good to pick up that first bag!

I have never undertaken any trash cleanups as ambitious as hers. When I was in Tunisia, I would walk for a few kilometers on the beach and pick up as much as I could carry. I always worried about where this trash went after I placed it in the dumpsters. Recycling in that region was pretty much limited to those few items that were profitable such as corrugated paper and plastic beverage containers. I was once confronted by a guard as I approached the fence of a beach resort while picking up garbage. I didn’t have the command of the language that it would take to make a nuanced response when I was asked what I was doing. This was a tense and awkward moment and it was discouraging.

When I first moved to Malta five years ago, I spent the first month living in a cheap apartment on the outskirts of a resort area. There was a lot of litter. Whenever I was putting our recyclables and garbage on the curb, I would always spend some time adding to our allotment from the stuff that was lying around outside. One day, a British expat across the street was laughing at me and telling me how futile it was to pick up trash. I think his words were ‘You’ll never get t all.”

I will never get it all but I still make a point of getting some of it. I am not a strong swimmer, so when the rest of the family is snorkeling in the deep I dive around in the shallows picking up ice cream cups and coke bottles and plastic bags and bendy straws. When I have gathered an armload of trash, I usually have to walk to a receptacle that is conveniently located next to businesses that cater to tourists. The big sunglasses that are in vogue prevent me from accurately gauging the looks that I get from these tourists. I have never had anyone join me.

Littering is one a a handful of social and environmental issues that I keep my nose out of when I am a guest in a foreign country. I do keep up with the local news and I quietly cheer on any local people who are speaking up about those issues. Tunisia has an official mascot for environmentalism. It is a cartoonish looking fennec fox that is often mistaken as a mouse by tourists. Malta finally has a real tax on plastic bags. Tourists sometime grumble and pay the Euro 0.25 per bag. Locals use reusable bags or sometimes cardboard boxes.

I think spending some time picking up litter while you are on vacation is a great idea. If you want to plan a vacation around cleaning up plastic trash, Hawaii sounds like the perfect place.

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I would like to drink more tap water because it’s less expensive and it doesn’t require any packaging. Unfortunately, the public water supply here on Gozo is quite high in sodium. The most extensive information that I could find regarding water quality in Gozo is ten years old. It states that 84.2% of samples exceeded the parameters set for sodium content by an EU directive. There was also this explanation:

This substance occurs naturally
in water. Standard set due to
unacceptable taste. It is
considered to be primarily
attributed to the islands’
hydrogeological characteristics
and environmental conditions.

Source (pdf)

My taste buds tell me that the salt is still there. We used a Brita filter pitcher when we lived in Tunisia. It effectively improved the taste of the tap water and gave us peace of mind with regard to all the unhealthy stuff that these filters can remove. Those are Lead, Mercury, Benzene, Cadmium, Copper and Zinc and more. It doesn’t remove Sodium. It doesn’t claim to. Since we already had the Brita we tried it anyway. Sure enough, the Gozo water filtered with a simple gravity fed Brita filter is still just as salty.

The easy choice for tasty drinking water is to buy it in 2 liter recyclable plastic bottles. That was our short term way to survive while we arranged for the next best thing – 19 liter returnable plastic bottles delivered by a company that uses RO filtration and UV sterilization to make the public water palatable. The cost is about the same as the water in recyclable plastic with the main advantages being that bottles are reused and of course that they are delivered to our door. A third choice that might have some cost savings is to buy a counter-top filtration system. They cost hundreds of euros but should in theory pay for themselves. We can’t justify the investment because we expect to be relocating before the ROI would kick in.

There are a few ways that we consume the tap water. With of our baking and stove top cooking we use tap water whenever water is in the recipe. The tap water makes a great lemonade with the locally grown lemons that are a reasonable euro1.50 per kg. We make tea with tap water. Many other strategies that people use for making use of bad tasting water are too unhealthy. I have no plans of drinking the Kool-aid.

Do you have tap water that doesn’t taste good? If so, do you have any interesting ways to alter it to make it more palatable?

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The recent demise of our Teflon frying pan was greeted as an opportunity to find a plasticless alternative. I have always been a fan of cast iron cookware. but I haven’t been able to find any pans locally. I wasn’t able to find them when I was in Tunisia either. Tunisia has local aluminum fabrication so aluminum cookware was abundant and affordable. I left my aluminum cookware in Tunisia for others to enjoy.

Earlier this week we picked up a blue steel frying pan from a catering supply store. It costs about the same as a similar sized Teflon pan with the big difference being that it could last forever. You have to season a steel pan with repeated treatments of oil and heat. Here is a link to some Amazon reviews of a similar product. People really love these pans.

Teflon is a plastic. Some studies have raised concerns that using these pans can add dangerous toxins to your food. From what I have read do far, this doesn’t seem to be a huge problem. The biggest environmental drawback with Teflon is that toxins are released into the environment during it’s production. Steel fabrication has an environmental cost as well, but I have to assume that buying and using one steel frying pan for a lifetime is greener than buying a new Teflon pan every year or two.

Choosing the most durable products for preparing food at home is a reasonably green activity. Preparing food at home from unpackaged local ingredients is a very green activity.

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cup holder

Originally uploaded by mhiggins7055

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Use Less Plastic from TakePart on Vimeo.

This cause is really starting to gain some attention. There is now a big flashy site called Save My Oceans with a page devoted to the issue of plastic waste. I would love to see some statistics later on to see how much real reduction results from all of our efforts.

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Glass Orange Juicer

Originally uploaded by AnnaAniston

You see a lot of fancy gadgets out there for making juice. The famous one is called the POWER Juicer. I use a basic glass orange juicer and it’s a pretty good workout for my forearms and wrists when I make lemonade for a family of five. I bought mine for a Euro.

Proponents of big expensive machines will say that they need it to make juice out of carrots and other hard and less than juicy produce. I am pretty sure you could eat the carrots raw in less time than it would take to clean your POWER juicer. Nutritionists will tell you that whole fruits and vegetables are better than juice. I will tell you that expensive hard to clean juice making appliances are a waste of money and resources.

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I read somewhere recently that the US Army is the biggest polluter in the world. That is quite a bummer. But I decided to think about the military industrial complex as a huge untapped resource. If some amazing change in human nature and human society brought a lasting end to large scale conflict, we would have a lot of really neat stuff to reuse. 2,475,967 footlockers for starters. They would be great for container planting of vegetables. Maybe combat helmets are up to DOT standards for use by bicycle commuters.  I don’t really have any brilliant ideas.  I just know that resources are being created and used up in unfathomable quantities and the world isn’t getting any less fucked up.

Back in 2008, I spent far too much time doing research for an elaborate joke about Dennis Kucinich being a ventriloquist’s dummy.  I was surprised to find out that there was a post war boom in dummy manufacturing that was spurred on by a glut in surplus materials.  If we could somehow manage to put an end to the making of war, we would have a similar glut of material, maybe even bigger.  Who knows what cottage industries might spring up to make use if it.  Some materials could be repurposed for alternative energy projects.

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Buying flowers for your Mother on Mother’s Day is pretty much a default behavior for many North Americans. I grew up in a rural area and I used to go out into the forest and find some mayflowers. When I was an adult living away from home, I would sometimes buy a hanging plant or a shrub. Cut flowers such as roses are the preferred option for many consumers and their demand fuels a big multi-national industry.

I was surprised to find out that over 75 percent of the 4 billion cut flower stems purchased in the U.S. come from Colombia and Ecuador. The conventional cut flower industry is far from green. It’s a very chemical intensive form of agriculture. There is of course lots of plastic involved in the production and packaging.

“I remember when it was all dotted with family farms, and now the Sabana is blanketed in one vast plastic sheet.”- Carolina DelGado from Jobs with Justice

The industry is using up vast tracks of land that was once used for subsistence agriculture and researchers have found pesticide contamination at soil depths of 300 meters. So much toxins are put into the soil ecosystem that it simply can’t all be broken down.

The post harvest treatment often uses chemicals that are banned in the US.

There is of course a huge amount of fossil fuel burned in order to transport these flowers to the recipient. Along the way they get fumigated by order of the USDA and they also usually get more plastic packaging. The worst part of it all for me is that they serve such a small purpose. They are pretty, but they die after just a few days.

Buying American grown living plants is clearly a better alternative to cut flowers. The product pictured in this post is from GivingPlants.com. They offer fast delivery of living plants that will keep on reminding your mom how much you care for years to come.

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New sports shoes from German manufacturer Puma will soon be shipped in a reusable bag made from recycled plastic. There is still a piece of cardboard inside, but it is easier to recycle and uses less resources than the traditional shoebox.

I hope this will put reusable bags in the hands of consumers that will actually use them in place of disposable bags.

I needed to buy new shoes for my kids last week and I was disheartened to find that they were in a clear plastic bag inside a shoebox. I can reuse or recycle the bags but they seemed really unnecessary.

Source : http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/04/13/puma.bag.design.sustainability/index.html

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Not so Dry…

Originally uploaded by mhiggins7055

Canada Dry crate floating in a farmer’s water reservoir. Soft drinks used to be sold mostly in refillable glass here until EU directives required the government to allow people to sell them in plastic bottles. The old system was seen as trade protection I guess. Local bottling in reusable glass made sense to me but only a few years later it accounts for just a fraction of the market.

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