Dumb Consumer Item of the Month - Single Use Plastics

The first manufactured plastic was in 1862. The first fully synthetic plastic was invented in 1907. 

The Plastic Age started in the 1950s.

And now, they are everywhere.

They are in the water, the soil, air, and our food.

But it seems to have taken up until 2024 to figure out that a lot of that plastic has ended up in our bodies. 

The health implications are not fully known, even after 70 years of using plastic. Big, open scientific questions about levels of exposure and toxicity remain.

A lot of the many tons of plastic produced over the years is for single use products. We can try to use it and lose it, but it just doesn't go away.

Some plastics can take tens of thousands of years to degrade in a landfill, so it is a problem that won't be solved any time soon. 

The lowly shopping bag and water bottle are ubiquitous global examples of noxious single use items.

"The economics of mass-produced, cheap plastic products have led to a single-use culture, and today around 500 billion PET bottles are sold every year.

This figure is increasing, and the majority of these bottles end up in our oceans, degrading into microplastics."

The degradation of plastic itself is a problem as it creates the microplastics that are popular in the news right now. 

These tiny terrors have been found at the top of Mt. Everest, the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and everywhere in-between.

It's not just sea turtles being threatened any more, so maybe we will start to take this issue seriously, and actually do something about it.

What is needed is a move away from single use plastics. But don't wait for any kind of outside action, we can all start our own de-plasticization program today.

A lot of single use plastic is used in the food industry, so that is a great place to start. Here are a few ways we have reduced this scourge in our home.

1. We try to get foods sold in plastic into glass containers at home as soon as possible.

2. We refuse to buy anything that comes in hard shell plastic. 

3. We have never used cling wrap, nor found it necessary.

4. We don't buy fast food, and very little processed foods.

5. When shopping we look for foods with no packaging, or are packaged in cardboard, paper, tin, or glass.

6. When in areas that did not have safe drinking water we treated tap water in our water bottle rather than buy bottled water.

7. The biggest thing that has reduced our consumption of single use plastic has been cooking as much from scratch as possible. For example, every time we make yogurt is a time we don't need another plastic container that needs to be "recycled" at a later date. We store our home made yogurt in a glass container.

The biggest thing we can do is rely on plastics less. Refusing plastic products will reduce plastic production, which will reduce plastic pollution, including micro plastics.

As always, before you purchase anything, think if you really need it, and if there are any non-toxic alternatives.