By Eleanor
In an effort to develop a more planet friendly lifestyle, one thing I’ve been doing for the last year or two is buying compostable or degradable bin liners.
I don’t actually compost at home, so the bin liners go straight to landfill, but I thought that at least they’d still break down a bit more quickly and be better for the environment.
I was wrong.
Continue reading “Compostable plastic: not as good as you might think”
By Eleanor
What’s worse: letting a plastic bag fly away into the ocean, or washing your face?
Everyone I know, and hopefully everyone you know, would chase after a plastic bag if it blew away. We do this because we know plastic in the ocean is bad, and littering is illegal in Australia, and anyway, beaches covered in rubbish aren’t very nice to be on.
By Eleanor
Could you eat plastic-free for a week?
I’m up to day 6 of this strange challenge I’ve set for myself. It was Bianca’s post in this blog, in fact, that opened my eyes to the issues of producing so much plastic waste. Actually, there have been several posts about plastic on this blog. Reading about this, and watching the really cool video in Bianca’s post made me think, but to be honest I didn’t try to change my behaviour.
Then I went to Japan for three weeks, and found myself constantly encountering plastic-gone-crazy products similar to what Bianca described. One time, buying some biscuits, I found myself holding a plastic bag, containing a plastic packet, which I would later discover contained a plastic tray, and in the tray each biscuit was individually wrapped. Don’t get me wrong: I really enjoyed my time in Japan and I liked many aspects of the Japanese culture. But they do seem to like plastic. Everything comes individually wrapped, and they even have plastic food in their shop windows.
I felt so bad for the planet that I decided when I got home I would try to go for a week without eating anything that came to me wrapped or contained in plastic.
This means no vegemite, sliced bread, nuts, rice, lentils, salt and pepper, spices, cheese, or tea. No tea!!!
I am a big tea drinker; I usually have multiple cups per day. I’ve had to substitute with honey + lemon in hot water, which is nice too, but not quite the same.
Luckily I have a breadmaker and I frequently make my own bread, so I have enjoyed fresh homemade bread with jam (from a jar) or butter (wrapped in paper) for breakfast.
The types of food I most often cook are Italian and Indian, so having to go without cheese and spices is a bit difficult. Fortunately, I have discovered you can get pasta in cardboard boxes. Fresh fruit and veggies are the obvious candidates as a basis for a plastic-free week, so I’ve had a couple of meals of stir-fried veggies, pasta and veggies, and salads.
My first failure happened on Day 5, ironically, during the “Nara festival”. I had visited Nara (which is Canberra’s sister city in Japan) just a few weeks ago, so I was quite excited to go to the festival, and it was a beautiful evening for it. One of the first things we did was watch a demonstration of “mochi pounding” where they whack sticky rice with big mallets to make rice pudding. We were excited to try some samples, which were quite tasty – but half way through eating it I realised, with horror, that I was eating out of a plastic bowl! I turned over the bowl to see if it was at least recyclable. Instead of a number in a triangle*, I found two faces that seemed to be laughing at me: “ha-ha, gotcha!”
Going forward, it is not sustainable to continue to avoid all plastic. But I would like to cut down the amount of single-use, non-recyclable plastic I consume. Here are the things that I’m going to try to do:
On Day 5, Take 2 (I had to try again because of my failure at the Nara Festival), I gave my mother a call. Before I’d made any mention of this project, she said, “I made hummus today, because I’ve been trying to reduce the amount of plastic I use.”
Spooky mother-daughter synchronization? Maybe, or maybe it just means the awareness is spreading. Could we make plastic-free a new dietary requirement?
* It turns out, in the ACT, they don’t use the numbering system. They say that any rigid plastic is recyclable – this includes semi-rigid plastic like biscuit trays. So maybe the smiles on the bottom of that plastic bowl are actually happy, ‘yes please recycle me’ smiles, not so evil after all!
By Biance
Following previous blog posts about plastic in our world, this is a new video everyone should see and share.
We are living in a world where everything is wrapped in plastic, quite often unnecessarily in tons of plastic.
I remember when we bought some cutlery and discovered at home that every single fork, every single spoon and every single knife was packed into it’s own private plastic bag just to be wrapped once more into a larger bag to bundle all forks, all spoons and all knifes to pack them once again in a plastic bag. It was not just a total waste of plastic it was also very annoying to unpack.
Maybe I shouldn’t have unpacked it, maybe I should’ve just give it back and try a different company but hey, who knows how often I would’ve need to return the new cutlery until I find a company that doesn’t use that much plastic?
Unfortunately, these days, because we have it and we can do it, companies just use it, everywhere and for everything. They don’t care about the environment as long customers buy their products. And that is where we can change things. It might seem like nothing, it might seem like there won’t be any change if we, as an individual person, act ecologically but if we all start thinking about the way we live and start to take care of our environment it is not just one single person but many of us and that can make a difference!
And yes, I should have given the cutlery back and try a different company! But at least I kept the plastic wrap somewhere at home in a corner so I can reuse it should I ever need some wrapping paper, whether it’s for cutlery or something else but this way I’ll not have to buy any more plastic for quite a while!
By Magda.
On this blog we have covered the topic of the marine garbage patch on several occasions (for example here, here and here) as well as how important recycling of plastic waste is. So far, most research was focussed on the influence of plastic on the marine environment, but recently several articles have drawn attention to micro-particles of plastic in lakes.
The first study to focus on this issue was conducted on the great lakes and found large amounts of micro-plastic within the lake (up to 466,000 particles/km2). The researchers attributed many of the perfectly spherical particles to the use of cosmetic products containing micro beads. Due to the small size these particles cannot be filtered and eventually will end up in our water ways.
And they are harmful – not only to the environment, as shown by another study conducted on Lake Garda, which found plastic in the digestion system of worms and other freshwater species, which is a starting point to introduce plastic into the food cycle and thus plastic will end up on our plates as well.
Unfortunatly micro-plastic will also form due to degradation of bigger plastic particles.
And, it doesn’t even stop there:
Micro-plastic is small and light enough to get transported by wind and has been detected in several products that we consume, including milk, honey and drinking water (found by a Swiss consumer affairs TV report). And most likely this list will get a lot longer, following more studies on this topic.
Many manufactures of cosmetic products using micro-beads (used in many toothpastes and body/facial scrub,…) have agreed to not use micro-plastic in their products from 2015. However, this will not solve the problem completely, since micro-particles of plastic are also formed by degradation of larger items.
By Claire
We’ve posted a couple of times about the giant garbage patches sitting in the middle of the world’s oceans, but I want to re-visit this topic again today.
Earlier this week, I attended a really great seminar, given by Erik van Sebille, from UNSW, titled, “Pathways of Marine Plastic into the Garbage Patches”.
Erik is a physical oceanographer, and so came to the issue of the ocean’s garbage patches from a different direction, “where does all the plastic come from?” Continue reading “Where does all the plastic come from?”
By Claire
I remember when I was in primary school, one of my teachers was obsessed with glad wrap. She hated the stuff! She would walk around the play ground at recess and lunch time, picking up all the little bits of plastic she encountered and encouraged us to do the same.
That teacher instilled in me a life-long (well, my life so far anyway) hatred for plastic and a desire to use re-usable products where possible. Continue reading “Plastic plastic everywhere!”
By Claire
The ACTs plastic bag ban has been in place for a year now and the world hasn’t come to an end (despite claims to to contrary).
The effectiveness of the ACT’s plastic bag ban has yet to be properly evaluated, with a report due out in the next month or so. This report will address claims that sales of plastic bin liners has increased dramatically in response to the banning of single-use plastic bags.
I actually live in NSW, where plastic bags are still allowed, and I do keep forgetting to bring my own bags when I shop in the ACT. (I do still try to remember to bring my own bags even when shopping in NSW. I have a plastic bag bag that is threatening to explode all over the kitchen floor though. I only need so many bin liners!)
As expected, the behaviour of ACT residents has changed in response to the ban, with customers now used to bringing their own bags to the supermarket.
While we have done our bit to limit the number of plastic bags being sent to land fill, globally, 1 trillion plastic bags are still used each year (a trillion = 1 million million!!). Continue reading “Plastic Bags: Are they really that bad?”
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