I’m totally fascinated by a new experiment being done by a BBC reporter, Chris Jeavans: A month without plastic. As the title of her already popular blog suggests, she is going to go without plastic for a whole month. The rules of her experiment are simple: She must not buy or consumed new plastic for a month and she can keep using whatever she had before. To prepare for her experiment and fully realised of its impact, she first collected all the new plastic she consumed for a month. If you want to see a video of it – which I totally recommend – follow this link, with WRAP‘s expert Paul Davidson. He explains to her what plastic is used in each product, how it can be recycled and some of the easy alternatives to reduce plastic usage.
To start with, she is getting a huge response in the media and creating a very healthy debate on how we use plastic. Just to see all the plastic an average person uses in a month can be quite a shock to some people. It has to be said this shock would be the same with almost anything we consume, just try to picture how much food, paper or even glass you will buy in a month. The interesting point she is making is that most of the plastic she normally uses, she could go without and a small part of it is truly difficult and senseless to replace. The disctinction between both makes all the difference.
So this fairly straigth experiment shows the general public how much of this resource we waste by not taking very simple steps, like using a ceramic mug for tea, reusable carrier bags or nappies. A month without plastic breaths the same air as the downsizing movement, which encourages people to consume less and waste less. Although anti-consumerism is not new, the opportunities given by our global world make spreading the word much easier.
The experiment started the 1st of August. Since then Chris is being telling us how she manages to go without a certain type of plastic product. The ones she’s touched until now are:
- Disposable tea cups, EPS or paper coated with PS
- Fresh food packaging, in particular rigid transparent trays,
- Milk bottles, HDPE and PET
- Bin bags, PE
- Nappies, sodium polyacrylate gel
So I have a quick look on the web at how these products are treated at the end of their life. I have also added possible alternatives to the plastic product, which are either reusable or biodegradable. I don’t mean to be exhaustive here, as the recycling of each type of product is a world in itself.
So I look forward to the whole month of Chris and I wish her the best of luck. I hope that companies producing plastic items take notice, at least to know wether their products are in the “i can pass without” or in the “i can’t pass without” category.
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A month without plastic – the blog
photo credit: jonny2love
