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June 15, 2007

Planet News: Pesky Plastics Prove Problematic

She could've choked, but would you take it away from her?

When I first visited South Africa, my SA friends joked to me that the National Flower of South Africa was not the King Protea, but the plastic bag. There were so many plastic shopping bags on the side of the road that despite the huge class differences, the government decided to give the bags a value - you are charged at the register for any bag you need. The bag tax worked and now the roadsides are less cluttered with litter.

Other countries, especially within the European Union such as Ireland have had similar successes. Yet in the United States, such taxes are highly controversial and slow to become realized. So far, only San Francisco has acted, but as of next month, all of California's large supermarkets will be required to take back and recycle plastic bags, which is a good step forward.

Yet these seemingly simple steps toward progress all happen at maddeningly slow rates. On the other hand, I know people who cut the tops off of yogurt containers to grow their seedlings. While I applaud them for their dedication to the REUSE principle, it's not something I can see myself doing in the short term as I routinely knock over the orchid plant sitting on the window sill.

Still, I do not understand why consumer plastics nowadays aren't made up entirely of old plastics melted down and reused. It's not that hard to melt plastics, from what I understand. It's easier than dealing with metal, isn't it? GI Joe figures are maleable, so why aren't we seeing more recycled plastics, especially in packaging. What's the deal here?

I see some stuff, like composite decking, may be considerably greener than their all-wood alternatives.

The Water Bottle

I drink a lot of water, compared to the average person. I always have. By high school, I had Nalgene bottles as part of my daily wardrobe. I have a variety of colors and sizes and logos, sipping attachments and such. My father joked about how I should buy stock in the Nalgene water bottles, and I needed my own support group, something like alt.addiction.waterbottles. I think I've had to chuck one bottle since 1992, because I cracked it.

There's been a lot of talk recently about the single serving water bottle, those sinister translucent personal drinking vessels filling our landfills at a rate of 30 billion a year in the United States alone. And frankly, the rest of the world - especially the third world - often relies on bottled water for safely reasons, so we're certainly not the only one using them.

Recently, my father sent me a New York Times article on the water bottle, titled The Unintended Consequences of Hyperhydration.

Eleven states — California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Oregon and Vermont — give this valueless stuff a value, however. Typically we pay a nickel when purchasing a container and get the nickel back if we return the container for recycling. It’s a deposit, a contract binding us to our garbage. Though these days, that nickel may elicit only the faintest twinge of regret as we toss the empty into the trash and rejoin our busy lives.

...

Bottle bills are still surprisingly good at inspiring recycling and reducing litter. But, though they are idiosyncratic in every state, the vast majority of the laws share one colossal, unanticipated flaw: they place a deposit on beer and carbonated beverages only. The bottle bill’s scope, and to some extent the very vision of a more waste-conscious world that first motivated it, has been swiftly trivialized by the ubiquity of bottled water. This year, Americans will drink more than 30 billion single-serving bottles of water. Oregonians will throw out about 170 million empty ones. Those same bottles, filled with something fizzy, would carry nickel deposits.

Reading this article strangely inspired me to poetry. Thankfully (for you and me), this doesn't happen very often. I decided to write a haiku poem about the water bottle, so here goes.

My Haiku To The Water Bottle:

Thirty-Some Billion
Annual Plastic Menace
Refill And Drink Up

Don't worry. I won't give up my day job, but you should consider how your family or company uses bottled water. If you have the drinking volume, switch to water coolers, and if not, for goodness sake, recycle those bottles anyway.

I remember when I was in Kenya, if you wanted to buy a Coke, you had several pricing choices for the same bottle, depending on whether you drank it there or took it with you. The price of the bottle itself is not insubstantial compared to the liquid itself. Also, consider where the water is coming from, and buy as local as possible. Water weighs a lot, and if your water is coming from across the country, or the world, then the environmental impact of shipping it to you is also not small.

Kitchen Products

One of the best things you can do here is start using cloth shopping bags. Not only will you reduce the number of plastic bags living in your pantry, but almost every shop these days gives a discount for bringing them in.

Disposable plastic cups and plates have no place in my home, and never have. My mother gave me some of her washable patioware when I went off to college - plastic plates that could be washed and reused for years. These inexpensive plates cost little more than a package or two of paper plates, so they pay for themselves quickly enough. If your mom gives them to you, then they're free.

If you have to use disposables, I've seen some recycled materials ones floating around in the market lately, like Preserve Plateware made from recycled plastic yogurt cups (also dishwasher safe so you can reuse them for a while).

Food Prep

My grandmother still washes out ziplock bags and reuses them, but frankly, I'm not that hardcore. I am going to try to put those old ziplocks to use though - in the form of putting yucky garbage waste in them so I can go longer without taking out the trash.

That said, I don't seem to chuck many ziplocks. Mostly we use them for permanent purposes, like our baggie of toiletries for airplane travel, and keeping the pieces of our boardgames in order. If I'm going to keep something in the fridge, I generally put it in a dishwasher-safe Rubbermaid container. The only time I seem to use plastic wrap is when I'm cooking things in advance for a party or something.

There are choices now for baggies, plastic wrap, recycled aluminum foil, and unbleached wax paper and parchment paper. Check out the kitchen section at Greenfeet for some other kitchen options.

Trash and Pet Waste

Garbage bags are an interesting topic though, as companies like Glad make their landfill-bound trash bags not biodegradable on purpose so the landfill "stays intact". I am not sure how this really works. If it biodegrades after 5 years or something, isn't that long enough for the landfill? I will need to look into this more. It certainly hasn't stopped companies like BioBag from coming out with biodegradable kitchen bags and food storage containers. They also make Biodegradable Doggie Doo Bags. Some cities like San Francisco are even using pet waste as fuel.

Other Health Products

Consider replacing disposable plastics with more permanent options, and if certain parts of a product need replacement - like razor blades, consider a product that only replaces that part instead of the whole unit.

Recycline's Preserve Product Line: Specializes in recycled plastic products including toothbrushes, razors, even flavored toothpicks. There are also items like toothbrushes made from other renewable materials, like the Source Toothbrush.

Posted by sorsha at June 15, 2007 2:17 PM