There's Got to Be a Better Way

You have probably heard by now about campaigns to stop using plastic straws, and efforts to ditch plastic bottles of water in favor of reusable bottles. Have you ever considered how pervasive single-use plastics are in our daily life? On a simple walk down the street or along the Greenway trail one will almost always encounter a piece of plastic trash that has not been disposed of properly.

We have packs of gum wrapped in plastic. Plastic peanut butter jars. Electronic gadgets in oversized plastic clamshells. Plastic bags at the grocery store. The ubiquitous plastic beverage bottles. Have you tried grocery shopping without purchasing something made of or packaged in plastic?

There are things we can do as consumers: limit our use of disposable, single-use cups and utensils when we eat out, bring reusable bags when we shop (for general groceries as well as produce). Skip the straw, or bring your own reusable straw.

But those are of limited scope and effectiveness. What about the companies that continue to manufacture and use plastic for every item they sell? It is a great material: sturdy, inexpensive. But as we are coming to learn, recycling facilities are inadequate and sometimes no longer cost-effective. These companies are reaping the benefits of cheap plastic while offloading the costs to cities and taxpayers to dispose of or recycle the materials.

What if the costs to recycle plastic had to be included in the sale price of an item—if an industry had to include the costs to recycle or otherwise safely dispose of all the materials in the item? That $4.99 jar of peanut butter ends up on your curb, collected and sorted and (hopefully) shipped off to a facility when it is cleaned and recycled into something else. All those costs are currently not included in the price of the peanut butter but rather paid using municipal funds collected from citizens as taxes and fees.

In a well-ordered system, collecting, sorting, and recycling would not be entirely on municipalities to handle, but on the industries that profit from manufacturing and selling these items. How quickly do you think companies would switch to biodegradable materials in lieu of non-degradable plastics?

That doesn’t leave us off the hook as consumers. Imagine if you had to dispose of all your trash and recycling on your own property. Could you? How would your buying habits change if all those plastic bags and peanut butter jars ended up in your backyard?

Well—they do. Maybe not your immediate backyard, but they have to go somewhere. Some pieces escape and end up on roadsides or places like the Greenway, or floating downriver; the rest ends up at a landfill or recycling facility. In our finite world, we all have to take responsibility for stewardship of our home.

The choices we make have an effect. Encourage elected officials to make changes that internalize the costs of doing business back to the industries that profit instead of externalizing them to taxpayers. And of course, skip the straw and bring your own bags to the grocery store.


Disclaimer: This is not a sanctimonious post, as I am 100% guilty of wasteful buying, with a particular attachment to fast food and its related wrappings. I'm trying to do better.