Life in Plastic, It’s (not) Fantastic

You know what really bothers me? When you’re at Wawa at midnight just casually buying some Ben & Jerry’s and the cashier double-bags your ice-cream. I mean, I understand the concept… it just irks me that you and each of your friends have two plastic bags each, the rims of the cartons are plastic, and everyone takes a plastic spoon (which is wrapped in even more plastic). The self-centered convenience of eating your ice-cream on the way back definitely can’t be worth the plastic waste involved in all that goes into one Wawa run.

In terms of plastic bags alone, over one million are consumed worldwide per minute; almost 80 percent of plastic water bottles end up in landfills rather than being recycled as planned (http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/ecocenter/How_to_Tuesday_Cut_Your_Use_of_Plastic_Plastic_Plastic.html#ixzz2gydcRoO8). As Annie Leonard explains in her book The Story of Stuff, the work-watch-spend treadmill is omnipresent with plastic usage. The vicious cycle of using plastics without proper (or any) inclination to recycling them has become the way consumptive practices work. Why is this a bad thing? Not only are plastics bad for the environment (which includes our health), but plastic is made from non-renewable resources and perpetuates a reliance on a product that increases greenhouse gas emissions.

So here I am, trying to hoard my plastic water bottles in my dorm. Reuse and recycle, right? It’s getting to the point that my desk resembles the Great Pacific garbage patch. I also think I’m beginning to scare my roommate. (Which is only partially a joke…)

So why is it that we naturally gravitate towards buying up more plastic water bottles that we don’t end up recycling? What do all those numbers in the triangular arrows mean? Do they really throw away water bottles if you recycled them with the caps screwed on?

In a titular 360, sorry Aqua, but life in plastic is not fantastic. (On a side note, your music video creeps me out.) If I use up anywhere from 4 and a half to 5 and a half Earths with my carbon footprint, something needs to change. Hopefully, cutting down on unnecessary plastic usage and truly understanding the basics of recycling plastic will help.