I Don't do politics - I do environment

In a gardening blog my wife follows she learned about the month long plastic challenge.  The challenge is to save all the plastic – all types for a month and at end of the month dump out the bag to learn what types and quantity of plastics you are using.

The image at the top of the page is our plastic use for October.  I am willing to assume that October is like any other month.  I guessed that most of our plastic consumption was in food containers and household cleaners.

As the picture shows I was only partially right.  By size the food containers for vegetables was large followed by cleaners and then liquid food such as milk and V-8.  The surprise was the number and volume of plastic bags that we use.  Nearly all of the plastic bags came from the grocery store.

I will take credit for re-using a lot of plastic bags to collect and dispose of cat litter.  All the others end up in the recycle stream.

This exercise has changed how we store food.  We’ve purchased a variety of glass containers with seal tops to store food rather than plastic bags.  When possible we don’t put store vegetables in a plastic bag and haven’t been challenged yet.  We are also much more conscious about buying vegetables in plastic containers although it limits choice.

A project like this is great in self-awareness to demonstrate how, just by daily living, a person contributes to the pollution of oceans, lakes and rivers.
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Why don’t you try it?