Slippery Slope

Due to my lapses during my Transatlantic tour that I have been finding it harder to toe the line since I came back.

At times when I started this project, I rejoiced in reduced choices and having to find alternatives. Lately I have found these things more tiresome, and I’ve given up and bought something in plastic a couple of times:

– Two containers of Natto.  I accidentally ran out of Natto, when I had been intending to use the last bit as a starter for making some at home.  (I thought I had one more container in the freezer…)  I have come to consider Natto and its nutrients (especially Vitamin K2 – and if you haven’t heard of it, I recommend looking it up!  It’s an important nutrient for bone and heart health, and it tends to be very lacking in our diets for complex reasons) as important for my health. especially since I am not eating my usual cal-mag pills because I can’t buy THOSE except in plastic…and I don’t care to get my K2 from Goose Liver Pate (and now I can hear my grade three teacher talking about run-on sentences).  So I decided to buy another container of Natto as a starter.  And since I was buying one, I bought another one for a friend to whom I wanted to introduce this food.

– a wooden toy in a cardboard box that had small amounts of plastic on it.  I couldn’t find a toy that I thought my nephew would like that was totally without plastic.  And the company that makes the toy, Hape, is clearly trying to reduce plastic. So that was an excuse I gave myself.

– Lids!!  I bought the more expensive mineral spirits (for oil painting) because they come in a metal can instead of a plastic container. But they still have a plastic lid.  To mitigate things, (again, it’s an excuse and a rationalization, I know) I bought the largest jug available (a $50, gallon jug of mineral spirits!) with the idea that I would be saving the plastic lid or lids on the next container I would otherwise eventually buy (i.e. on those two or three small bottles that I would normally have bought instead).

The ubiquitous plastic lid… I have always remembered this one line from a Fringe play that I saw when I was in high school.  It was a mock Gothic Romance.  The main character was a woman living in a castle with the mysterious Mister Nod, who was clearly a Mr. Rochester knock-off, who turned up all over the castle when she wasn’t expecting him.  At one point she swooned in a kind of ecstasy while exclaiming about “the ubiquitous Mister Nod and his ubiquitous hands!”  Maybe it doesn’t sound so funny now, but at 14 I thought it was hilarious.  Anyway, I still always think of that when I hear the word “ubiquitous”.  Alas, I experience no ecstasy at the veritable ubiquity of Mister, Ms., and Junior Plastic and all their many cousins, turning up all over the planet where no one could ever have imagined they might ever wind up.

While I am (sort of) on the subject of 18th century novels, there is that great line from “Northanger Abbey”, when Catherine is walking along the beach at Bath hoping to run into Henry Tilney who is, however, not to be found.  Instead,  the beach is full of crowds of people “whom nobody cared about, and nobody wanted to see”!  I always thought that was a very funny line, too. And somehow it reminds me of all the unwanted plastic on beaches (if I really must personify plastic this way).

Well, so now it must be evident that I am somehow torn between being obsessed and being totally bored with this plastic thing.  Next post I will have some links to interesting articles written in THIS century, and I promise they won’t involve great conceits– you’ll be able to see clearly how they relate to my topic.

 

 

Written on a Plane

I am writing this one on the plane on my return from Europe (on the plane ticket I mentioned here in my post on indirect purchasing).  As I somehow expected, air travel made a complete mockery of my low plastic project.  If you factor in the indirect purchases, I bought plastic many, many times on this trip. If you don’t factor in the indirect purchases, I still bought plastic many times.  In other words, I fell off the wagon.

Even before I left, I had a few accidental plastic purchases to acknowledge here.  If I remember correctly those were:  1) tea bags wrapped in plastic, instead of the paper I was expecting (the whole thing was packaged in cardboard so I couldn’t see); and 2) a brass bicycle bell that came in a cardboard box that obscured my view of the plastic component that was inside.

But once I got on the plane, the Plasticfest began in earnest. Airplane travel is a crazy carnival of plastic consumption.  Why provide beverages in just one plastic cup, when you could use seventeen to provide the same amount of fluid?  (I exaggerate; but it would be easy to obtain six or more clear plastic cups in one trip, and difficult to avoid acquiring at least one plastic-wrapped beverage on a long flight, unless you refuse all refreshment).

The meals, of course, are just as bad. 

I also bought at the airport a plastic toy for a child I was going to see at the other side. My choices were either a plastic toy in cardboard packaging, or a non-plastic toy in plastic packaging. I had run out of time to get a toy before I left, and I was unwilling to show up without one.  Social considerations trumped my commitment to my low plastic project.

With my doubts and lack of resolve about my low plastic diet on this sudden and unplanned journey, these initial slumps were sufficient to open what turned into a relative flood of plastic buying.  Once in Europe, I ended up buying various groceries in plastic (being unable to homemake certain foods, and unwilling to restrict my diet and my activities that much on this trip for various reasons, including– toward the end of the trip– illness).

On my last airport layover, wishing for a coffee to help me change time zones, I bought it in a disposable plasticized cup.  Having slid so far, this act didn’t seem like too big of a deal. My sensitivity to plastic is dissolving by the day, it seems.

Now, I face what I have heard called “the mother of all practises: getting back onto your practise when you have fallen off it.” (It was a Ken Wilber quote I read somewhere, I think).  And I will get back on my low-plastic project, but I have discouraged myself.

What I have learned:  first of all, it is totally possible to reduce plastic on air travel but you need to be prepared with a ceramic cup (better than a glass, as I had, unless it is double walled or otherwise insulated).  The airline attendants will serve you coffee, water, and juice in your own cup, no problem.   Second, I doubt that it is really possible for most people to eliminate plastic use on such trips, even if you define ‘eliminate’ as something wishy washy, like 95%.  There may be some options for feeding yourself on long flights, but given the restrictions on carrying food over international borders, and bringing liquids in luggage, there must be quite an art to this. I will research it when I have internet again.  Even so, I’m going to guess that it must require a combination of organization, planning, and willingness to go without that is beyond most travellers, including me, given that when traveling you are usually stressed, busy, and under many other constraints.

So, if change will come, it is probably incumbent on the airline industry to take charge.

In the ‘best of breed’ category based on a class of two, I would say that Air Canada is better than KLM for plastic use, because they let you bring your own earbuds for the movies and they will only sell you a headset (they don’t  pass them out for free). They also only sell beverages on board, rather than giving them away, except for water.  Now if some airline would bring in an unpopular, untenable policy like providing only real glass glasses for wine and juice, and ceramic cups for tea and coffee, and using a deposit system  for these— then they might make dent in the some 4 million plastic cups used daily by the US airline industry alone.  (See Chris Jordan’s photograph about this statistic here).

I can feel my own discouragement, telling me that changes like this are not possible and never going to happen. But then I remember that I am thinking this while traveling at 499 miles per hour, at an altitude of 40,000 feet above sea level.  I am going to have traveled from Europe to Canada in 12 hours, a journey which used to take many weeks of seasick sailing.  How can we let the airline industry, or anyone, ever tell us that eliminating disposable plastic is impossible?