Reduce plastic waste :: PlasticLess.com

First off, a hearty congratulations are in order for To-Go Ware. Their cause and their products got the most important endorsement in the Universe. Oprah likes their stuff.

The Earth Day edition of the Oprah Winfrey Show put a spotlight on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and gave some valuable advice to her viewers on how to reduce plastic waste.

I hope that Oprah will remember the issue of plastic waste for more than just one episode. Hopefully future installments of her Favorite things won’t include stuff like melamine bowls.

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I bought this toothbrush today. It is a Trisa brand toothbrush with that comes with two sets of bristles. The bristle heads snap on securely. I had to apply quite a bit of force to remove the head from the handle. I have twin daughters that are 15 years old. They could not get the head off the toothbrush. Asking someone stronger than you to change the head on your toothbrush after you have been using it for three months sounds kind of intimate.

The intended end user of the toothbrush gave it a thumbs up.

From a plastic reduction standpoint, the Trisa my Planet is okay. There is a precise comparison on the back panel of the package. Compared to buying two toothbrushes, the my Planet amounts to an 81% reduction in packaging and a 70% reduction in the materials used for the product. The overall reduction in materials is 72%.

I wish the company had gone the extra mile and used an alternative packaging strategy. I also wish they had included more than two sets of bristles. The store did not have any replacement heads. I do not know if the company even packages them separately. I wrote about other options last year, but I haven’t seen any of them in local stores. If the my Planet and the Preserve were side by side on the supermarket shelf, I would have a hard time deciding.

EDIT: The toothbrush that I bought was for my son. I am seriously considering giving miswak a try when my toothbrush wears out.

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Photo Credit: ThrasherDave

When I worked at JustUs Coffee, I had a coworker who was quite vocal about his hatred of Styrofoam packing peanuts. We were a production facility in the middle of major steady expansion, so we ended up receiving packaged equipment quite often. My hatred for packing peanuts was increased several fold when I opened up a box that contained a sample roaster that had gone away for repairs. It was resting in quite repose in a bed of expanded polystyrene peanuts. All of its nooks and crannies were also filled with little crumbs of the stuff. This is a device that I was to use for roasting 100g samples of coffee for taste testing. Burnt expanded polystyrene probably doesn’t taste very good. I don’t know because I spent an hour carefully removing the stuff.

As an environmentally conscious business, we had a policy of saving packaging for recycling or reuse. Those peanuts were sometimes a big time suck. JustUs is also a retailer of Bodum Coffee Presses and other delicate things, so the peanuts came in handy before Christmas.

Other businesses and households might not have a practical way to reuse all the packing peanuts that show up at their doors. This can be a problem since most recycling programs don’t want them. They are designed to take up space and if you are saving them to avoid sending them to the landfill, you soon find out just how effective they are at taking up space. If you have some saved up, you can punch your postal code into a form on Loosefillpackaging.com to find the nearest Styrofoam Peanut Drop Off Center.

Some companies are responsive to requests for alternative packaging. It is always worth a try.

Buying used items locally and picking them up yourself pretty much guarantees that you won’t be bringing home any packing peanuts.

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I desperately needed a computer mouse this week and all of my choices in the local retail market came with excessive plastic packaging. I am reusing a flat portion of the plastic as a super heavy duty laminate for my list of emergency phone numbers. I try not to have a cluttered desk and, as a result, my very important emergency phone number list gets used as a coaster.

I am living in a very out of the way place, so my options are limited. Ordering online would cause a pretty big carbon footprint, especially if I had to get the mouse shipped to friends in Canada so they could mail it to me here. Most of my wonderful readers have the option of ordering from Amazon and choosing Frustration-Free Packaging. I wasn’t aware of this option until today and I think it is awesome. Manufacturers like Microsoft send stock to Amazon with recyclable cardboard packaging instead of the plastic clam shells that are designed for store displays. Buying something online and having it shipped in an over-sized plastic display package that in turn is placed in a larger than necessary cardboard box is ridiculous. Ridiculous packaging is something that knows no limits. When you buy a mouse like the one pictured here, the box that it is originally packaged in is sufficient for shipping. It’s the opposite of ridiculous.

Buying a used mouse is an even more environmentally responsible choice. Most of the people that I know use computer mice until they cease to function. In a large population center there must be some people who upgrade because they need a mouse that is color matched to their laptop. There are probably gamers who regularly upgrade to a faster mouse. There may be people who think their mouse is broken when really there is just a matrix of dust and elbow grease blocking the optical aperture (eww).

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Q&A web pages like Yahoo Answers offer a chance for people who feel strongly about a cause like plastic reduction to speak to people who aren’t blog readers or tweeters. I am talking about people who ask questions like “is there anymore sites like yahooanswers?”

Questional.com is new and I am happy to see that it includes an Environment Category. I am even happier that they emailed me about their site while a certain very motivated anti-plastic blogger is asleep so I could answer a few questions about plastic before she does

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Wooden kitchen utensils beat plastic hands down in my opinion. For on thing, A wooden spoon doesn’t melt when you accidentally leave it in a hot pan. I remember the way the edge plastic spatulas used to deform over time. Wooden spatulas get dull, but I just sharpen them.

I think it is better to buy locally made items. Since the vast majority of my readers are American, I will suggest a site like Handcraftedwoodenspoons.com as a ‘local’ source. Keeping an eye out while you’re in local kitchens and asking questions might lead you to something more local. If you can find them, items made from wood derived from agriculture endeavors like Apple or Olive are great. If you buy inexpensive wooden items that come with no explanation of their species or origin, you might be buying something that was harvested unsustainably. We have several spatulas and spoons made of olive wood. I thought it was a kind of homey thing to buy, but when I Googled ‘olive wood spoon’ I found out that fancy chef suppliers carry them. We paid 1/15 what they are charging. I once bought a wooden spoon at a government funded pioneer village kind of place in the middle of nowhere in Canada.

Most of the mass produced utensils are made of beechwood. I assume that this is because its physical properties make it suitable for mechanized production. It could also have something to do with the fact that it grows in China.

I think disposable wooden utensils are almost as bad as plastic. Disposable wooden chopsticks are a problem in China and elsewhere.

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Now that the weather is really nice I am going to be posting these more often. This time, I took some actual pretty pictures and included them in a Flickr set

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I have seen plastic footwear washed up on the beaches of three continents. Most inexpensive flip flops are made from Ethylene Vinyl Acetate (EVA).

The most enviro-friendly choice for summer footwear is bare feet. That being said, going barefoot is not for everyone and it poses some risks. There is a lot of gross stuff on the ground and also some sharp objects.

Ethletics makes all natural rubber flip flops that are Fair Trade. I love the business model employed by FairDeal Trading, but I am too cheap to buy their $60 sneakers. If you are a shoe fetishist AND an ethical greeny, you need to get a pair of green low tops. The flip flops are affordable and when you kick them off at a pool party, the Ethletic label will let people know that you care.

We often have to choose between plastic and leather when we are shopping for footwear. I am hesitant to recommend leather because of the host of environmental negative involved in its creation. Canvas and natural rubber seem like better choices. Sticking the words ‘vegan shoes’ in your search query is the best way to avoid leather.

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Photo Credit: Hugo90

Planes, trains, automobiles and more can become an obsession for nominally sane adults who don’t mind the smell of glue. A lot of plastic and other materials are expended on miniature versions of the equipment that we use to get from point A to point B.

The concept of having a hobby was confined to the upper class up until the last few hundred years. I think people who have a surplus of time and a crafty mentality would do better to find an activity that is sustainable and might even benefit the earth. Gardening is the first thing that comes to mind. There’s no airplane glue involved, but manure can be almost as overpowering.

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Saying no thanks to a plastic shopping bag when you buy that bunch of bananas is good for the environment. It may surprise you to know that many intensively grown bananas are covered with a polyethylene bag when they are maturing on the banana plant. Here is what it says on a commodities website:

“Banana bunches are covered with polyethylene bags in order to protect them from wind and attacks of insects or birds, as well as to maintain optimum temperatures, creating a micro-climate.

I know first hand that agriculture can be very plastic intensive. I grew up in a rural farming area during a time when many of the cattle farmers were adopting new practices. Farmers that used to harvest one or two crops of hay from a grass field started cutting the grass earlier in the spring and making silage. Silage is kind of like sauerkraut for cows. The farmer stores the still wet grass in a tightly packed anaerobic environment where beneficial microbes cause some fermentation. The idea is to make the pile inhospitable to the microbes that would cause spoiling. Many of the methods used to make silage require huge sheets of plastic. Some farmers have access to a recycling program for this material, but many do not. I once walked down the length of a tributary of the Musquodoboit River looking for two missing geese (long story) and I picked up several large pieces of plastic that had been blown into the water from nearby farms.

Another plastic intensive practice that started when I was a kid involved housing baby Holsteins in individual plastic igloo-type enclosures. Dairy calves are not typically housed with their mothers since they aren’t allowed to nurse for long (if at all). Keeping the calves separated from older animals (and each other) reduces the incidence of contagious disease and the fresh air reduces the incidence of respiratory problems. Air quality is not always that great inside a barn filled with cows. In Eastern Canada where I grew up, severe weather or careless storage and handling would sometimes render these cheap housing units unusable. They would be thrown away. ‘Away’ is very big in Canada.

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‘Away’ is pretty big where I live now as well. I noticed that some date farmers protect their crop with plastic bags. There are date groves as the edge of the Sahara Desert. I imagine that a lot of this plastic gets blown off the date palms and out into the desert. I took a three hour trek out into the desert and I have to say that it looks pretty unlittered once you get out of sight of civilization.

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It really doesn’t matter how big ‘away’ is when you realize that plastic lasts ‘forever’. We are already finding that out in the Pacific Ocean where the plastic is gathering into a giant swirling garbage patch. The trees of Canada and the sand of the Sahara can only hide so much plastic.

Update: Just to clarify, I am much too wimpy to live in a place like Douz. I went south on an adventure, but I live in the most northerly and city in Tunisia where the environment is green (in color) much of the time.

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