Plastic-Free-ish July 2019

Last year, as you may recall, I had a somewhat frustrating experience attempting to take the Plastic Free July challenge. Although I signed up for only the most basic form of the challenge—pledging to avoid plastic "takeaway items" (bags, bottles, cups, and straws)—I still wasn't 100 percent successful, and I felt guilty about every little scrap of plastic that found its way into our home, no matter how small or how difficult it would have been to avoid. I concluded that for most people, avoiding single-use plastics entirely simply isn't a practical goal. Instead, reducing plastic waste will require changes on a societal level, such as imposing fees for plastic bags in cities and towns, putting stricter requirements on manufacturers to make their packaging recyclable or otherwise sustainable, or improving methods of plastic recycling.

Well, since then, there have in fact been a couple of changes in society, at least in our area. On the plus side, our town has enacted a new plastic shopping bag ban, which means we don't have to be as vigilant as we used to about avoiding plastic bags when we shop. (Even though I always brought my own reusable bag, I wasn't always fast enough at getting my groceries into it before the clerks shoved them into a plastic bag I didn't want.) But on the minus side, our curbside recycling program no longer accepts plastics other than #1 and #2. This same change has been occurring pretty much all over the country, because China, which used to be the final destination for most of our plastic waste, has stopped accepting these plastics. So now, any plastic that does make its way into our house is less likely to get recycled.

So, although I didn't officially sign up for the challenge this year, I'm still planning to track my plastic use this July to see how much waste I produce. I'm keeping a day-by-day tally of all the single-use plastics that enter my home, and in each case, noting what alternative (if any) I could have chosen to avoid this plastic, and why I didn't. Here are my results for the first week of the month.

July 1
Went to Rite Aid to pick up a prescription. I did not get a plastic bag to carry it in, so that's good. On the downside, the medicine came in a #4 plastic bottle, which isn't even recyclable. Unfortunately, I had no alternative in this case; that's just the way the medicine is sold.

July 3
We made a shopping trip to Trader Joe's and picked up several items, some with plastic packaging and some without:

• A 19-ounce block of tofu. The #2 plastic container it came in was recyclable, but the peel-off plastic lid was not. However, there were no other brands there that came without plastic packaging. If we had put off our purchase until our next trip to the Whole Earth Center, we could have picked up a block of tofu from the bulk bin, but we'd still have needed a plastic bag to carry it in (and anyway, we wanted the tofu for this weekend).
• A bag of chocolate chips. We could have bought these from the bulk bins at Whole Earth and carried them home in a reusable container, but only for a ludicrous price (something like $12 a pound).
• Two cartons of almond milk. These cartons are made mostly of cardboard, but they're lined with a thin layer of plastic and also have a plastic spout and cap, so they're not recyclable. One of the most frustrating things for me about switching to almond milk for the sake of its lower carbon footprint is that it has considerably increased the amount of waste our household produces, since milk comes in recyclable plastic jugs and almond milk does not. In theory, I could make my own, which would greatly cut down the amount of plastic waste involved (though not eliminate it completely, since the almonds themselves also come in a plastic bag). But the big problem with that is that homemade almond milk, made without thickeners, requires far more almonds than the commercial stuff. This makes it both much more expensive and much more destructive to the environment—which kind of defeats the purpose of buying almond milk in the first place.
• Five nectarines. We could have bought a whole dozen nectarines for $6, but them came in a cardboard crate with a plastic top and plastic liner. So, for the sake of avoiding that waste, we bought the nectarines from the bulk bin instead for 69 cents each—over 50 percent more per nectarine.
• One free sample of vanilla ice cream with blueberry pie and fresh raspberries. It came in a little cardboard cup, but the store had also provided a small plastic spoon (which I couldn't decline, since it was already in the cup). However, I did not throw this spoon away, but instead tucked it into my purse to use any time I encounter another free sample that doesn't come with its own spoon. So technically, it's not waste.

July 4
We went to the Folk Project's annual Fourth of July picnic, deliberately taking along our own plates, cups, and utensils so we wouldn't need to take any disposable ones. As it turns out, this didn't prevent any plastic waste, since the Folk Project was using paper plates and cups anyway (which may have been counterproductive, since the evidence suggests that single-use cups made from much-maligned Styrofoam have a lower carbon footprint than paper ones). Ironically, though, we still ended up going home with garbage, since the park where the picnic was held has a "carry-in, carry-out policy" that you must take all your own waste home with you. Since we never fill up our big trash bin anyway, we volunteered to carry home one of the Folk Project's trash bags for disposal.

July 5
With Brian off from work for the holiday weekend, we made a trip together to the farmers' market. Due to a minor oversight, we were unable to bring our reusable mesh produce bags, because we'd left them in the trunk of our car when we dropped it off at the shop that morning. But that was no problem, since we had some reused plastic bags to take along instead. In fact, our waste production on this trip was actually negative, because we took the opportunity to return a cardboard egg carton to the farmer we'd bought it from for reuse. We also dropped off some plastic bags for recycling in the bin at the Stop & Shop and some other items in the Terracycle bin at the Reformed Church.

To round out our sustainable outing, we visited the Dunkin Donuts and successfully ordered a sugar-laden beverage in my reusable travel cup, with a reused straw from our sizable collection at home. We even picked up some litter off the street during our walk—not actually eliminating any plastic waste, but at least helping to keep it out of the oceans.

July 6
While preparing a pot of chili for dinner, Brian realized we were out of onions, so we ran out to the Stop&Shop for one. We got this out of the bulk bin, so it didn't come with any packaging—but while we were there, we spotted some pasta on sale and decided to grab a pound. It was in a cardboard box, but it had a small plastic window in the front, so that added one tiny piece to our non-recyclable plastic load. (We could have avoided this waste by buying pasta from the bulk bins at the Whole Earth Center instead, but it would cost more than three times as much that way. If we cared that much about the Plastic Free July challenge, it would have been much cheaper to put off buying pasta at all until July was over.)


My preliminary results from this one week of waste-tracking show that we're producing more waste in total this year than we were last year, mainly because of the switch from plastic milk jugs to almond milk cartons. True, a smaller volume of that waste is plastic, but a larger volume of it is non-recyclable, so it's not really an improvement. However, I would still say that we're not using a lot of single-use plastic, certainly not a lot compared to most Americans. There's a little bit of room for improvement, but I would say not so much as to be worth the trade-offs.