The Annual Plastic Sermon
Hear ye, hear ye! The planet is awash in plastic trash. Most of you probably grasp the enormity of the problem (the June 2018 National Geographic offers a sobering wake-up call), but what to do given that our lives have become so intertwined with the stuff over the past 70+ years since WWII?! So much so that some 9 million tons of it ends up in the ocean each year, beaches are ankle deep in it, and sea animals' bellies are full of it.
We're guilty of using plastic on the farm, no doubt about it. Drip tape, row cover, harvest bins, potting soil bags, pallet wrap, plastic mulch on the strawberry beds. I anguish over it, even though we get many years' use out of most of it before it gets recycled or hauled to the dump. Which is why I was surprised to learn that agriculture and health care combined account for just over 10% of the 450 million tons of plastic garbage generated worldwide each year. I thought it would be a much higher number. The shocker was this: packaging for consumer products makes up almost half of the plastic that gets tossed. Shopping bags, that elaborate box your cell phone came in, the molded plastic around the Tonka truck you bought for your kid's birthday. It's the stuff we buy, unwrap, and immediately put in the garbage. Here's a factoid: a plastic shopping bag has an average "working life" of 15 minutes. Another factoid: it never goes away; it just gets smaller and turns into micro-plastics (i.e. the multi-colored grains of "sand" we encountered on a beach in Hawaii last year).
So for years, even before I realized how bad the plastic problem had gotten, we have done little things in our household like wash and re-use our plastic bags and ziplocs (my sister-in-law who is visiting from San Diego this week looked at me in semi-horror when I showed her our bag-washing system; "I've seen documentaries about people like you," she blurted). :)
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