My efforts to reduce plastic have been met with several stumbling blocks. One of them involves running out of credit on my pay as you go cellular phone. I can pay for a 14 digit number at many locations. This number is on a plastic card that comes wrapped in plastic. This is completely avoidable. I can get a number without any material waste at all from the service providers kiosk or I can use my credit card and get topped up over the internet.
One thing that I have done to reduce my plastic waste is to avoid the temptation to get a new phone. I think the constant upgrading of cell phones is one of the most pointless and wasteful practices going on in our culture today. Mine isn’t as old as the one pictured. I didn’t even get one until 2005.
August 29th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
I agree that we are a ‘must have the new one’ generation, however one should never have to throw away a cellphone even if it is broken. There are lots of organisations that will recycle cellphones, not sure where here, but in the US they have bins in shops to collect these phones. They then fix them and send them to developing nations. I have been involved with more than one primary school that has collected them as a class project.