Why give up plastic?

I’ve been putting this off because I haven’t known what I was going to write, but a friend suggested to me last week that I should write a post about why I wanted to avoid plastic and he’s absolutely right, this post needs to be written. So why do I want to avoid plastic? Well, that’s a very good question, one to which I'm not sure I have a very good, or at least a very logical, answer.

The simple answer, and perhaps the most accurate, is a movie, a book and a beach. The movie is the Canadian documentary Addicted to Plastic, which I watched at the Vancouver Film Festival last year, the book is 100-Mile Diet, which I read over the Christmas holidays, and the beach is the pristine white sands of Kuna Yala, Panama. And Sayulita, Mexico, for that matter. And Kitsilano, Vancouver if you really want to get down to it. But it was at Kuna Yala that I found it most striking. I was on a patch of sand in the Caribbean in early November, a deserted island you might say, nothing but white sand and coconut trees. And plastic. Lots and lots of plastic. It kind of made me want to cry.

Really, when I decided to make a New Year’s resolution about it, it wasn’t much more thought through than that. Just a vague sense of something being terribly wrong with the world and plastic having something to do with it, and the inspiration of trying to do something for a year, the way the authors of 100 Mile Diet tried to only eat food that came from within a hundred miles of their house. The difference being that their resolution was possible, whereas mine is definitely not. At least, not for me. Maybe it is possible for someone in theory, I don’t know.

I suppose it comes as much from ignorance as anything. I think I’m hoping that not using plastic will make me think more about plastic, maybe do some research about it, learn more about it, maybe I’ll discover that there’s no reason not to use it after all. But at the moment images of plastic gyres in the Pacific, tons and tons of oil used to produce plastic, the impression (everybody says it, therefore it must be true) that so much of it can’t be recycled, that it doesn’t really break down, and that when it does break down it cause toxic chemicals to be released, well, all of these things make me wish that maybe we could all stop using it.

Another friend pointed out that I would be foolish to get rid of the plastic drawers I am presently using. After all, sometimes plastic really is the most durable, flexible material, and, she sensibly suggested, if I threw out the plastic and replaced it with wood, wouldn’t I only be contributing to the problem? Of course she’s absolutely right about throwing out the plastic drawers, but one of the things that I hope to achieve from this process is to challenge the second idea – that sometimes plastic really is the best material. While I'm sure there are occasions when plastic might be best suited to a particular task, I’m not at all convinced that it needs to be as ubiquitous in daily life as it presently is. I feel there must be other material options, and maybe even better ones, not just better because they're not plastic, but better because they're actually better. Part of the point of this is to open my eyes to those other options. I’m hoping to cure myself (and maybe other people reading this) of the automatic tendency to choose plastic, either because it’s easier, or maybe just because it’s cheaper.

I think that's basically it. The vague, not-particularly-thought-through idea.

As for the research, I've been learning about Persistent Organic Pollutants today. I'll try to summarize what I learned in a posting sometime soon. That is, after all, the real point of this venture. To force myself to write, which forces me to read, and learn, and maybe share what I've learned. I have five followers now, too! Can't leave you all hanging! :-)

And thank you all so very much for replying and posting!