In January 2007, maddened by plastic trash, we began to boycott plastic products that bugged us, source plastic-free alternatives and blog about it. Since then we have refined the process. We believe that plastic is a great product being badly misused. So we boycott misused and abused plastic, but that isn’t nearly so catchy -find out more about us and the boycott here
January 5, 2009 at 1:44 am
I need to do better about this. I don’t have a good place to buy in bulk so that makes it hard. I have cut plastic more than 75% I believe.
January 12, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Can we sort out a bit of the stuff here please ! Firstly, there is only one major eco problem that faces our human future on earth – global warming. If we get that wrong, then all the other problems on litter, marine pollution, etc., will pale into total insignificance. So, we should be concentrating on our carbon footprints.
Sure, we can replace plastic with ‘traditional, natural’ materials like metals, paper, glass and cardboard but unless you do an eco-audit you don’t know whether you are increasing or decreasing your carbon footprint. And all the academic (as opposed to commercial) work on replacing plastics seems to indicate that this would cause a larger carbon fotprint – approximately double! Yes, we would use less plastic, but that is not the object of the exercise is it?
Let’s also try to put things in perspective too. Yes, we all use too many polyethylene carrier bags (about 220 each annually) but if you look at the carbon footprint they create for each one of us then we discover that it equivalent to driving less than 20 miles a year. Yes, all your polythene carrier bags make a smaller personal carbon footprint than driving an extra 20 miles a year in the average car
So, lets use less of everything please, we can all agree on that, but also lets get some eco audit information (and not done by Greenpeace or Shell Chemicals) available to put the whole thing in perspective otherwise we risk ‘fiddling whilst Rome is burning’
August 23, 2010 at 1:57 am
You’re on the right page, plasticsman, but in the wrong paragraph. Yes, use less of everything. But let’s face it — plastic is a poison. As a species we have been around for a while, killing things with sharp sticks way back when, etc. . . . But, fuck, plastics? Sixty years. Really? Sixty years. Pointy sticks — way back when. Are we so incredibly stupid? Plastics. Sit in a bar and watch the plastic waste. Eco audit that. Multiply per bar, per town, per city, per county and shire, per state, per country, per continent, per world.
It’s not one thing or the other, plasticsman, it’s a particular attitude. Mostly arrogance. And ignorance. Foolishness? Greed?
Selfishness. Self-centeredness. Self-hate.
Pity. Shame.
Stupidity. Short-sightedness.
I don’t need an “eco audit” to tell me the human race is really fucking it up, so why not start with plastics — a foreign product that is destroying our world?
May 13, 2009 at 9:46 am
I agree on plasticmans blogpost; that we should use less of everything. When it comes to plastic my biggest concern is that people throw plastic away and eventually it ends up in the oceans, creating the giant PLASTIC SOUP, please join my PLASTIC SOUP group at Facebook http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/PLASTIC-SOUP/138391605060?ref=ts
Is it possible to become totally plastic free? I dont think so. We need plastic in many ways. WHAT we need more is a plastic politic helping the consumers to get rid of plastic in the right ways and have more recycling plastproducts etc. And a overwiew off all eco harming behaviors would our carbon fotprint less.
Thanks Hekla
May 16, 2009 at 1:33 pm
so true
May 25, 2009 at 6:09 am
Так зачитался, что пропустил любимую передачу)
June 20, 2009 at 7:52 am
Hopes thats something nice – thanks anyway
June 20, 2009 at 9:14 am
babel fish says it reads
Thus it was read, that it passed the dear transfer
not sure about that though probably supportive in its own way
p.s. hope you read the plastics supplement in the Guardian a few weeks ago
June 21, 2009 at 9:24 am
thanks for the translation – no I didnt read that _ I will see if i can google it. Was it supportive? Last thing they wrote about plastic ( that I read) was strange to say the very least
August 13, 2010 at 4:51 pm
Plasticsman is of course correct, in that the carbon footprint of plastic is miniscule compared with many other carbon releasing properties. And yes it does need to be put into perspective. But as Trashprint points out, plastic also ,does get into the Oceans and does unspeakable harm to the ecos systems there. I have seen far too many images of dead and dying fish, mammals and birds to want make me stop campaigning to rid the world of this toxic, synthetic nightmare. Plastic never goes away, it just breaks down into nodules (See the film on ‘Addicted to Plastic,’ free on line, for the horrible truth). Every sq kilometre of the ocean is teeming in these tiny nodules, which birds eat thinking they are food. Whether it’s recycled or not, its still a massive problem.
August 14, 2010 at 5:22 pm
I agree with John and while plastic has a relativly small carbon footprint ( depending on which figures you are using) its impact eleswhere is huge:
There is the pollution of the visble environment .
The deaths of hundreds of thousand of animals mny of them already rare.
Cost to tourism as landscapes nd beaches become unpleasantly polluted.
Cost of cleaning up. above.
The huge increase in all waste needing to be disposed of.
Cost of special incneratores needed to burn the flthy stuff.
Potential health costs as poisons, carcinogens and hormones leach out plastic into the surrounding environment.
Costs to communities who cannot dispose of plastic as we can as plastic chokes their rivers and covers thier fields.
In all of these plastic is a leading contender so while it may have a small carbon footprint that inn no way excuses its many failings.
August 23, 2010 at 7:56 am
My basic point, which appears to have been forgotten, is that the major environmental threat to our race is global warming. If we ignore this, then the pollution and loss of diversity effect will far outweigh the pollution and diversity loss said to emanate because of plastics. These other eco problems, litter, hormone disrupters, acid rain (remember that one ? )death of other animals, and pollution are all important BUT they are less so than global warming. If we as a society want to restrict plastics because they contribute to litter whilst replacing them with non-plastic alternatives, then we are surely ‘fiddling whilst Rome is burning’
March 2, 2013 at 11:34 am
plasticman, your example was for plastic bags, the ubiqioutus “t-shirt bag”. One item of a whole waste stream, composed of many,many different materials. My point is that when done correctly, recycling is worth doing for many reason as folks have sited here, but Co2 also gets a kick in the teeth if you recycle.
Of course not using (prevention) is best and recling clearly is next, have a good one
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/waste/measureghg.html#beneficial
September 1, 2010 at 7:34 pm
I have long been confused by the general perception of plastic as cheap and disposable, considering it’s pretty much the least disposable material around.
Regarding the global warming vs. plastic thing, I think it’s ridiculous to claim reducing plastics will in any way reduce efforts against global warming. The whole point here is sustainability, and given that plastic is an oil-based product, reducing the amount of plastics will also reduce the demand for oil to produce the plastic. It’s all part of the same process.
People have this strange notion that the only solution is to find some new super efficient clean energy source – until which time there’s no point. Why not use less energy?
To go a step further, the whole of modern western society is based on the automobile. People don’t live where they work. Shops aren’t where people live. Everything is somewhere else, and you get there in a car. It’s a macro-form of division of labour – division of civilisation. Everything is designed for maximum economic efficiency, compartmentalised into isolated competing sectors. There is no co-operative spirit, no societal eco-system. Suburbs, business districts, industry, cultural centres… We’ve thankfully not gone done the route of Le Corbusier’s nightmarish “Contemporary City”, but in some ways what we have now is worse. We have new cities built around, in between, and on top of old cities not built to sustain them.
That to me is the larger issue, larger even than global warming. Whatever portion of global warming is man-made or man-accelerated, it all flows from an utterly unsustainable mindset that is at the heart of all of western society. I would go back beyond Adam Smith, for blame though. These problems have their roots in monotheism.
Anyway, I’ve waffled on for ages here and gotten off the main topic.
I think plastic is a perfect metaphor for global warming, amongst other things, as it demonstrates an illusion of disposability, a culture of waste. The irony being that this supposedly disposable waste will outlive us.
September 3, 2010 at 2:01 pm
That’s exactly it – as long as people think they can have a new bag every time they go shopping and don’t have to reuse bottles, that we can create vast amounts of rubbish and not worry about the disposal costs,rubbish that as you say will outlast us all we are going to have planetary problems on a massive scale. Besides being a massive waste of plastic which has so many great permanant uses.
September 20, 2010 at 3:32 pm
Can you please insert us on your whoswho of PBF culture.
http://www.salisburyplasticfree.org
March 4, 2011 at 3:46 am
Wow. I am not sure how I got on this particular blog post after such a long time has passed, but I am grateful to everyone who had something to say…
I hope you all are still fighting the good fight!
Keep on rockin’ on…
March 8, 2011 at 12:24 pm
still here honey still refusing plastic – if you facebook you can join us at Planet trash
April 24, 2011 at 4:23 am
You’re absolutely right in that most plastics only get used once. I think on top of boycotting plastics (which is pretty difficult), we need to increase our efforts in recycling and reusing plastic first. Meanwhile, we need to continue developing new materials as plastic alternatives. As you have mentioned, bioplastics have been quite popular. However, due to the cost of this, we do not commonly see bioplastics being used.
April 25, 2011 at 9:00 am
Honey, being good aint ever easy….. keep up the recycling tho I prefer precycling and resusing myself
November 1, 2011 at 11:23 pm
wow Plasticsman went off on one there great read thow looking fwd to the next blog
November 4, 2011 at 1:17 pm
Hey nice of you to drop by – and thanks.
November 11, 2011 at 8:11 am
I think the economic incentive is missing for people to want to overhaul the current paradigm where the ubiquitous plastic bags (How I despise them!) are concerned. It seems like at this point, a tiny army of underground recyclers raid the curbside totes at night for profit and manage to keep a small percentage of plastic out of the landfills.
The large supermarket chains let you recycle your plastic bags. Some Bay Area (Northern CA)municipalities have outlawed the use of plastic bags entirely (SF being one).
But this doesn’t go far enough.
The Obama Administration has pushed for hi-concept alternative energy creation, but what about the latent energy that already exists in the form of discarded, or misdirected plastics like that bottle of detergent that my neighbor ignorantly throws in the trash instead of the recycle tote. Why is it that when trash ends up in the recycle tote, someone sorts through it, but not the other way around? Recycling that ends up in the trash, almost always goes to the landfill (at least in my zip code) unless a single-stream solution is adopted.
In this case a bunch of jobs (albeit low-paying ones) would be created, assuming that landfill reclamation were a major priority instead of an afterthought.
Greendreamer
November 13, 2011 at 8:33 am
I did read that sometime in the future we may well be mining landfill for all sorts of stuff including plastic. But then I read they have found out how to make plastic from chicken feathers, and all sorts of other stuff.Which means that there will be even more crappy plastic products in our bins. Consumers did to protest…ho hum.
Thanks for dropping by
February 11, 2013 at 5:00 pm
I was wondering if you ever considered changing the layout
of your blog? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say.
But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people
could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having 1 or two images.
Maybe you could space it out better?
February 11, 2013 at 9:07 pm
Thanks for the kind words. I would love to find time to redesign my blog but I have had real problems changing themes in the past and I often I can barely find time to post . One day maybe.