I have officially not purchased plastic for 8 weeks. This may not seem like a long time, I mean I still reuse plastic existing within my realm of consciousness, I just don't buy it. So what's the big whoop? What is so hard about not buying plastic? Well give it a try. Try not consuming plastic for a week, two weeks, a month. See what happens. See what I mean.
It all starts in the aisles of the grocery store. See what happens as you peruse the grocery aisles on your weekly shopping trip. Stop at any given moment, look within your range of view. Are you not wooed by the aggressive flirtations of plastic? Now give this a try. Hold your hands over your eyes, peek through the cracks like a kid during a sex-scene of a movie, and try not to see any plastic within the slits of your fingers. I tried this. Parades of multicolored plastic chip bags, concourses of plastic condiment and dressing bottles, plastic tags, even stickers on the fruit and vegetables-plastic bags to bag the produce and plastic knives to cut them with, with plastic signs labeling how much they cost. Plastic, plastic, plastic: the Savior of the super market. The challenge was to see anything but plastic. Even as I gazed at the ceiling, curtains of plastic hung displaying the food in that aisle. No matter how hard I tried plastic impregnated my view. Whether it was the container, or part of the product, when in a store, I was wooed by the unending lines of part-plastic products waiting to be used like a hooker in the night, a one night stand with plastic.
It all starts in the aisles of the grocery store. See what happens as you peruse the grocery aisles on your weekly shopping trip. Stop at any given moment, look within your range of view. Are you not wooed by the aggressive flirtations of plastic? Now give this a try. Hold your hands over your eyes, peek through the cracks like a kid during a sex-scene of a movie, and try not to see any plastic within the slits of your fingers. I tried this. Parades of multicolored plastic chip bags, concourses of plastic condiment and dressing bottles, plastic tags, even stickers on the fruit and vegetables-plastic bags to bag the produce and plastic knives to cut them with, with plastic signs labeling how much they cost. Plastic, plastic, plastic: the Savior of the super market. The challenge was to see anything but plastic. Even as I gazed at the ceiling, curtains of plastic hung displaying the food in that aisle. No matter how hard I tried plastic impregnated my view. Whether it was the container, or part of the product, when in a store, I was wooed by the unending lines of part-plastic products waiting to be used like a hooker in the night, a one night stand with plastic.
My commitment to non-plastic life was planted in my mind, in freshman biology. Professor Gates asked all of the students (hundreds in the class) to write a paper about how to lessen our ecological footprint. He suggested a quiz at www.myfootprint.org measuring how much "nature" it would take to sustain our individual lifestyles. Although I was already an earth conscious person, according to the ecological footprint quiz, if everybody lived the way I did, it would take 4.15 earths to sustain the human race’s lifestyle. Yet I discovered an average American's lifestyle would take 7 earths to sustain.
Wow! Instant awareness of how much I was trashing the world. Something had to change for me. I was determined to know how I could live in congruence with the earth instead of in competition with it. Previously my mentality was subconsciously like some game, "okay earth, let's see who will cause the other to cease to exist first, you or me. Ready, set, go!" This is not a game! At this point I made an ardent effort to figure out how I could reduce my waste. I realized going non-plastic would completely eradicate my waste creation and decrease my ecological footprint significantly. So this year for my New Year's Resolution I decided to stop purchasing plastic. I do not support the consumption and waste of plastic. I reuse plastic that I find, or that I already have, but I do not purchase it. My philosophy behind not using plastic came from the realization that plastic is not biodegradable, it is often not recyclable, and the majority of my waste is plastic.… And I was just one person out of millions adding to this.
I am approaching this New Year’s resolution with the question ‘is this even possible?’ Well that’s where we will see. I, Rose Allred, am not purchasing plastic for one year. I commit to this.
Well what’s the big deal with plastic? What is so wrong about the incomprehensible amounts of plastic around us in any given second? What’s wrong with throwing away my coke bottle, or my cheese wrapper, or my iPod touch packaging bubbles? Good question. And these are the very questions I am exploring this year as I refrain from what feels like the inevitable: plastic.