To Cut Plastic Waste Out of Your Life, Start Small
Zahra Hirji | August 2, 2022 | Bloomberg
As soon as Carolyn Armstrong started looking for plastic in her life, she realized it was absolutely everywhere.
There are the plastic water bottles and straws, of course, but also makeup, clothing, laundry detergent, food wrappers and packaging. “Everything that we use is encased in plastic,” Armstrong says. “Sometimes, I go to the grocery store and take pictures of the fruit that is behind the plastic and I email the store and say: ‘Please stop doing that!’”
The 52-year-old author first thought about cutting plastic out of her life while researching a children’s book on ocean plastic pollution, and soon joined Go Green Winnetka, a local environmental activism group. But this year, for the first time, Armstrong took her commitment a step further, pledging to go plastic-free for an entire month. She’s far from alone: For more than a decade, people all over the world have been taking a similar pledge, formally known as Plastic Free July.
It’s difficult to overstate the scale of the planet’s plastic problem. Each year, about 11 million metric tons of plastic waste ends up in bodies of water, according to the United Nations. Over the next two decades, that number is expected to triple. Facing a crisis, the 175 member countries of the UN Environment Assembly in March agreed to develop a treaty for curbing plastic use by the end of 2024.
Companies, not individuals, are the biggest plastic offenders. Specifically, 20 companies, which produce more than half of all single-use plastics, according to a 2021 analysis by the Australian nonprofit Minderoo Foundation. Oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp. is the world’s top plastic polluter. But that hasn’t stopped millions of individuals like Armstrong from trying to cut their own plastic footprint — even if only for a month.
How to use less plastic
“I never set out to start a global movement,” says Rebecca Prince-Ruiz, who founded Plastic Free July in her native Australia. “It started the last week of June in 2011, when I visited a recycling facility for the first time … I was really overwhelmed just seeing what we throw away as a society.”
The next day at work, Prince-Ruiz told her colleagues she was going to spend a month trying to cut out single-use plastic, and asked if anyone wanted to join. The beginning of July just happened to be coming up, she says. Fast forward 11 years, and several million people across 190 countries have taken part in the campaign, according to research it commissioned.
To reduce your own plastic use — in July or any month — the best place to start is “just looking at what the plastics are in your life,” Prince-Ruiz says. “Have a look in your trash, have a look in your fridge, your pantry, your bin at the workplace. Just choose one or two items to try and tackle, because if you try to do everything — and believe me I’ve tried — it can be really overwhelming.”
Fortunately, some of the easiest plastic items to drop are those you use every day.
Plastic food wrappers
Opting for loose fruits and vegetables rather than pre-packaged produce is one way to ditch some plastic, Armstrong says. And depending on what you buy, there are other ways to limit packaging. “Our house drinks a lot of orange juice,” says Beyond Plastics President Judith Enck. So she switched from the plastic bottles to frozen orange concentrate, and bought two reusable glass pitchers to serve them in. Enck also convinced a family member to start making their own iced tea rather than “buying the big plastic thing of Honest Tea,” she says. “It’s an extra step but it’s really not that inconvenient.”
