Reduce plastic waste :: PlasticLess.com

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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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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I am reusing a statement made by Jason Sweeney as my title for this post. Those three words have sent my mind in a hundred different directions thinking about what impact the human pursuit of perfection has on this planet. Most of it isn’t good, some of it is involves plastic.

The concept was still rattling around in my head when I went to the kitchen this morning to make the kids some French toast with cooked fruit topping. The apples that I bought on Friday are not perfect. They look like the apples that I used to scrounge from abandoned homesteads in Canada. They taste delicious.

Consumers in the developed world supposedly want perfect apples. The customer is always right, and those customers get pesticides, genetic engineering and lots of protective packaging.

Photo credit: Brett L

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These plastic crates are used as part of a local returnable bottle supply chain. Consumers in this city also can choose to buy plastic bottles that came with thick plastic wrapped around every six bottles. These come by truck to a local supermarket on a pallet and the whole stack of six-packs are held steady using a lot of plastic wrap. It’s not hard to figure out which option is less wasteful. I had a discussion on twitter recently about the carbon footprint of returnable glass. It really comes down to distance traveled. If packaging and distribution is localized, the returnable glass option looks pretty good. Despite the logic, returnable glass distribution networks continue to disappear in the developed world.

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More people should be carrying water from their house to their place of work. I read recently that most people don’t drink as much water as they should. A stainless steel water container in your bag or briefcase would be a tactile reminder that you need to hydrate your body throughout the day. A pocketful of quarters could buy an overpriced plastic bottle of water from a cafeteria or vending machine, but many of us would be swayed by the sugary drinks and snacks that are often in the same vicinity.

I do not own a stainless steel water bottle. They are highly recommended by Beth Terry of Fake Plastic Fish fame. Back when I was working on my Dad’s farm in the summer, we always drank water from a reused plastic 2 liter soda bottle.

I carried on with that practice during most of my years at the sawmill. As luck would have it, some 21st century technology required the input of purified water, so the company installed a filtration system in one building. We were blessed with some water coolers and a hose from which to refill them.

When I managed to land my awesome job roasting coffee, it was for a company that had a cafe attached to the plant so of course they had to have a system for dispensing good water. I drank from a glass.

If I were commuting to a job every day now, I would most probably invest in a stainless steel water bottle and fill it from my Brita pitcher at home.

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I am living in a unique economy here in Tunisia. One big difference that I see is the persistence of returnable glass in the supply chain of liquid consumer goods. In much of the western world, this is something from days gone by. The only niches where it has persisted is with beer and to a lesser extent wine.

Three doors down from where I live, a typical neighborhood shop sells cooking oil, vinegar, bleach and detergents in identical bottles that are delivered and picked up by the same truck. The soft drink suppliers bring both plastic and glass to the store, but they only pick up the glass.

My casual observation is that close to half of the non beverage trade of liquids is carried out using returnable glass.

Plastic and aluminum appears to have returnable glass beat in the beverage trade. I could be wrong about this. When I attended a wedding reception this summer, I was served a 200ml returnable glass bottle of soft drink. Most small stores have soft drinks available in both returnable and disposable containers. Local customers are often not charged the deposit with the understanding that they will bring the bottle back to the store in a timely fashion.

It’s actually a lot like North America 30 years ago. I would love to see someone do a careful study of the environmental costs of the two options in a small economy.

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Let’s get this out of the way first. Plastic waste doesn’t CAUSE flooding. Rain causes flooding.

Discarded plastic bags and plastic bottles DO impact the efficiency of flood control systems in several ways. Besides the obvious potential for clogging drains, plastic waste can also take up a lot of the volume in detention ponds. These problems are either dealt with using taxpayer funded labor and equipment, or they can be ignored with the hope that it never rains all that much. The danger presented by an accumulation of plastic trash in an urban storm drain can prove deadly after days of heavy rain.

Photo credit: bjornmeansbear

Plastic bags were made the scapegoat during a particularly deadly monsoon season in Mumbai in 2005. Plastic bags did clog the system. The system was very old and not designed to deal with the massive population that live in shanties clustered around the city center. The system was also poorly maintained. The system was built before plastic bags were imaginable. Laws against plastic bags had been imposed before the 2005 floods that killed over 1000 people.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, we have places like Salt Lake County, Utah. It’s not a place where you expect to hear about deadly floods. It’s infrastructure is not particularly ancient or under funded. Plastic garbage does accumulate in the drainage system. Draper is a city of just under 40,000 people and it employs 3 people full time to clean the trash and debris from the drains. There are almost 14 million people in Mumbai. I don’t know if they have 1,000 people cleaning out the storm sewers, but that’s how many people it would take to be proportional to Draper. Littering is more prevalent in the developing world, so Mumbai should probably have several thousand people cleaning out the storm drains. They do have a squad of Plastic Bag Police.

Making an individual choice to use less plastic won’t do much to prevent floods, but if everyone made the same choice it could make a huge difference

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I was happy to see this big bin installed on the public beach access this summer. A lot of water bottles that may have otherwise ended up in the sea are placed in it. At the same time it serves as a daily reminder to me that collecting and recycling plastics is a costly and inefficient process. My blog is supposed to focus on the first ‘R’, Reduction. I have reduced my own consumption of plastic water bottles as much as possible by drinking filtered tap water.

Here are a few quotes that I have found, both optimistic and pessimistic about recycling plastic…

Recycling is almost universally regarded as a virtue. I beg to differ. The act of recycling actually means that we have failed to reduce or reuse.
- Gary Hirshberg

Recycling a single plastic bottle can conserve enough energy to light a 60W bulb for up to 6 hours.
- South Lakeland Recycling

I am not sure how they got these numbers. The fact that a lot of plastic is transported for huge distances leads me to doubt the figure.

The majority of the plastics we recycle, regardless of type, end up in China, where worker safety standards are virtually nonexistent and materials are processed under dirty, primitive conditions…
- Mindfully.org

Recycling one ton of plastic saves 7.4 cubic yards of landfill space.
- Earth911

These quotes are starting to look like ‘tweets’. Maybe I will recycle them

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I was back on Gozo last week. It was great to be back there. I think I will always consider it to be one of my favorite places to live. Unfortunately, visiting involved drinking water out of plastic bottles

The summer heat resulted in my family drinking a lot of water. I didn’t count the bottles, there were a few in the rented flat when we arrived and the flattened bottles filled two large paper shopping bags when we tidied up at the end of our stay.

The tap water there is distastefully high in sodium. If I was a local green activist, I wouldn’t ask them to improve on this, since the water comes from a diesel powered desalination plant. It removes enough salt to meet the standard for safe drinking water.

When we were living on Gozo, we opted for a purified water delivery service that used refillable 20 liter jugs. Homeowners on Gozo often choose to install inline filtration systems to provide drinking water. Neither of those options are practical for a one week vacation.

I wrote about my setbacks and victories related to drinking water back in February. When I am visiting places in the future I think I will spend some time searching for accommodations that have some kind of water filtration. I have stayed at a hostel in Florence that had a drinking water dispenser. I’m not a big fan a posh hotels and I suspect that they wouldn’t go that route as it would cut into their sales of $5.95 plastic bottles of water. Beth Terry recently blogged about her switch from a hotel to a hostel after BlogHer, she is a very entertaining writer.

Proximity is important in my travel decisions for economic and ecological reasons. If I lived near a selection of destinations with tasty tap water, this problem would be solved.

A travel filter is another possible solution. There was no way that I was entrusting my Brita to the baggage handlers on my recent trip.

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What does this guy think of my efforts to reduce plastic waste?

I was walking down a hill in a part of town that was evidently far outside of the ‘Zone Touristic’ and I saw this guy pulling his cart up the hill. I used basic sign language to ask if it was ok to take his picture. Later, I crossed the street to thank him and give him a dinar. I don’t ask people involved questions about their business in this country. In part it is because we have a shared second language and my fluency is lacking. Add to that the fact that a minority of the people here aren’t fluent in French either.

The real issue is social. I empathize with these guys and imagine being very annoyed by a foreigner, who I would perceive to be rich and privileged, asking me for details about my hard fought existence. When I was in my 20s, I had a job as part of the landscaping crew at an international airport. One day, a Japanese tourist stopped for a few moments to take pictures of me digging a trench. He was a gardening enthusiast and he asked me about the specifics of the task. I was, specifically, burying an extension cord for a temporary traffic sign. He was disappointed in the answer and I didn’t feel like I got any benefit from the interaction either.

Even if it was possible for me to have a free flowing conversation with a bottle collector in a developing country, I am not sure what questions to ask. I could ask how long he works each day. I could ask him if he earns enough money to provide for his needs. I could ask him if he is choosing this work over any social programs that would also provide for his needs. I could ask him if he gets any satisfaction from removing litter from the environment (my impression is that dumpsters are the preferred source of bottles).

Since I can’t ask or answer these questions, I will have to add some value to this post by linking to what other people have written on the subject.

Here is a unique perspective from a Chinese blogger who is spending time in Europe. Qian Qin was surprised to see bottle collectors in Berlin and he decided to do the math. He determined that they were rivaling local waiters in potential earnings. There is a 25 cent deposit in Germany. This means that most people don’t trash their bottles, but you can always count on a few.

A Canadian commenting on Qian Qin’s post said that the refund is only 0.5 cents there. It’s more than that in some provinces. When I was working in a big factory in 2001, there were two older employees that had a turf war about the empty pop cans in the numerous lunchrooms around the property. They felt that it was worthwhile to spend their breaks from $10-17/hr jobs to collect cans. The shopping cart guys in the cities mostly seemed a little crazy.

Here in northern Africa, they bottle collectors don’t look crazy, for the most part. They are typically old enough to not have kids to feed.

John Romankiewicz wrote a post about recyclable collectors in Beijing. There are an estimated 160,000 people gathering all kinds of discarded materials in that city. The global economic crisis hit their bottom line hard, as I suspect it did to people in this business almost everywhere.

With so many poor people relying on our culture of waste, I worry about the consequences of the efforts of people like me to reduce that waste. The hard fact is, things has to change.

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