Plastic Free July
paulrhayes.com
paulrhayes.com
I challenged myself to buy no packaged food for a week. I made it 2.5 weeks at zero and the experience improved my life so much I decided to keep going using as little packaging as I comfortably could. As my cooking skills improved I bought more fresh fruits and vegetables and, from bulk bins grains, dried beans, nuts, and dried fruit. I shopped increasingly at farmers markets. I came to see Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and other markets as wastelands with more garbage than food in them.
I was throwing my trash out once every other week, then once a month. Now the last time I emptied my garbage was September 2018 and the time before that July 2017. Here's a video showing my garbage the first time I went one year without filling a load: http://joshuaspodek.com/year-emptied-garbage.
My food tastes better, costs less, is more convenient, and connects me with my community more, as more people come over and I've visited the farm where most of my vegetables come from.
If you also believe that we need institutional changes from corporations, government, etc, the fastest, most effective way is to start with personal behavior, building on it, and leading others.
Fruit and veg without plastic is available at your local supermarket.
It can be a bit annoying to weigh it - you can use reusable bags for that - an easy one would be that you can get at least 10 uses out of the clear plastic bags you take the stuff home in for example.
Processed stuff is harder sure. I tend to not really eat that stuff, staples are cheaper anyway.
I agree that most people don't do this - well over half of the supermarket is full of items I'd never even consider buying - but that doesn't change the fact they could.
I actually think there's a hump in the middle of the distribution.
Essential basic foods are cheap and generally come loose (or at least you'll get 15kg of rice in one big bag).
There are some exceptions like frozen vegetables.
Processed middle of budget stuff like pre made sauces, ready meals, pre packaged small cuts of meat etc - yeah that's full of packaging.
Then you have the signalling products whereby basically you're paying silly money for ready meals in cardboard boxes or whatever.
You can go to a butcher they wrap up the meat in hair thin plastic bag instead of the bulky one in supermarkets.
If you go to a grocer/farmers market you buy almost all things lose. Packaging is an entirely different industry with people adding their own (usually substantial) margins.
In Lidl nowadays they sell loose nuts etc, also cheaper then prepackaged ones.
You dont have to buy cashew in organic bamboo leaf packaging hand crafted by Cambodian virgins, just bring your reusable bag.
First, where I live, in sunny suburban Houston.
There are definitely no places around here that sell fresh meat, nuts, grains, beans, etc without plastic for less than a national brand in plastic at WalMart - forget the Cambodian virgins...
The food may certainly be fresher and better and healthier - but it's not cheaper.
And in the aggregate if I substituted cheap plastic bagged cereal, prepackaged frozen meals, and juice jugs for a farmers market / bulk store meal plan, my food budget would skyrocket.
If it really, truly cost less to go without plastic, poor people would do it, they do any and everything to save a dollar on food.
I was full of envy because by that time of year, New York, where I live, has mostly cabbage for greens. Your local farms had a variety of greens in season (meaning plentiful and cheap). I'm pretty sure I could eat cheaper in Houston than here.
We also went to a store called HEB with a huge bulk section. We filled bags we brought with us.
We ate delicious, healthy, nearly package-free at low cost.
I'm not sure what you tried, but I find experimenting for a week or two doesn't give enough experience to learn to cook from scratch fast and cheap. For example, learning to cook beans from dry in a pressure cooker is fast, simple, and very low cost. Here are reviews of my famous no-packaging vegetable stews that resulted from my experiments: http://joshuaspodek.com/food-world-reviews.
> If it really, truly cost less to go without plastic, poor people would do it, they do any and everything to save a dollar on food.
I suspect causality goes the other way, at least in part, that eating habits, prompted by poor education and predatory marketing, contributes to them being poor. As I understand it, your logic would suggest that poor people wouldn't drink alcohol, but I see lots of alcohol stores in poor neighborhoods.
I feel you've cornered me into at least trying an experiment here in the next month or so to "upgrade" my meal plan.
I'll do my best to catalog the process and results - maybe there'll be a guest blog on joshuaspodek.com soon ... :)
I find what leads people to change is community more than facts, figures, doom, gloom, etc.
I only lived in the UK and Hungary and both places sell stuff I mentioned. I'm very suprised to learn about the USA practices regarding this.
> If it really, truly cost less to go without plastic, poor people would do it, they do any and everything to save a dollar on food.
Then it seems like the problem is with the system indeed, if people are easy to motivate with savings. People try to save on food here too, that's why almost nobody buys the prepackaged meat from supermarkets (happens more in London where people are not that price sensitive).
Based on the quantity of meat I see in supermarkets in Hungary (not that much at all), I estimate 98% of the meat sales happen at butchers where you ask for a certain weight (let's say 2kgs of chicken breasts) and they put it into a thin plastic bag.
Very weird differences.
> And in the aggregate if I substituted cheap plastic bagged cereal, prepackaged frozen meals, and juice jugs for a farmers market / bulk store meal plan, my food budget would skyrocket.
Very sorry to hear about your frozen meal habit, I did that for a year and it took me about 5 years to recover from the weight gain and a general bad health state.
You have not asked for advice but perhaps you can try to make one dish meals in bulk using mostly cheaper ingredients like bulk rice & beans, cheaper veggies, eggs etc. It's generally much cheaper and healthier (again, we are in different contries, so YMMV).
Well, that equates to saying "poor people are not poor enough". I'm not saying you're wrong, but the only fix to "the system" is to make things a lot more expensive. If there were any substantial progress towards that, there would be riots and politician's heads on pikes.
Now, if there is a cheaper and more ecofriendly solution is available, then yes, I think the less ecofriendly version should be much more expensive as a penalty.
I think it's more about the effort that goes into it. If you look at what the op said, op travels to farmers markets, hits up bulk stores and butcher shops and generally puts effort into tracking down and sourcing out these things. For the op, it may well be cheaper, but it comes with a pretty large time sink(comparatively) and some amount of planning, I also wonder if op is factoring in travel time to their costs. It costs more to travel to a few different stores, both in gas or bus fare if these places are distant, plus in the time it takes to get around to these places. If someone has limited time and resources, in the end, it ends up being easier and more efficient to go to one store and spend the money on packaged foods than to make the trips op says.
This is from my own personal experience. I used to live pretty close to a butcher shop and a fresh produce and bulk place, the food quality was always better, the prices were better for what you got, you'd pay a lot more at the grocery store for the quality of meat you got from the butcher, but in the end I found myself going to the grocery store more often then not, just because it was easier after work or during the limited free time I had.
The most efficient thing to do might be to sit on your laptop all day and eat pop tarts or something. I'm only half joking.
But yeah, the answer might well not be as simple as "just do this one thing differently". It might even be a massive change. Whether that's a burden is in the eye of the beholder.
Essentially to use a christian term its cheap grace. Its easy for a kind person to be kind; but its hard for them to be stern when it is needed.
My parents moved there after I left (I visit once/yr), and that place is a literal swamp, and would not be so populous without the invention of AC.
>If it really, truly cost less to go without plastic, poor people would do it,
On what are you basing this statement? I don't use the plastic bags in the produce section, I just put produce directly in the cart (and wash them when i get home). Prepackaged food costs more because the manufacturers are "adding value." Try making potato or tortilla chips at home, and tell me it's not cheaper to pay $0.25-$0.60/oz ($4-$9.60/lb). Raw potatoes are $2/lb; cornmeal is even cheaper.
It's all about convenience. Convenience stores have the most ridiculous prices for almost everything, and they sell a lot; gas is the loss-leader with razor-thin margins.
I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Sincerely,
If you blindly shift to whatever the store is promoting, you'll pay more.
I joined CSAs (if you're around NYC, I recommend mine http://joshuaspodek.com/where-to-buy-the-best-food-around-ne...). Dried beans and lentils are a couple dollars a pound, pre-soaked and pre-cooked.
I learned to buy in season, which means the ripest things are in greatest quantity at low prices, plus they vary. I'm swimming in tomatoes now, for example, and they taste incredible. A couple months ago it was lettuce.
I also get to know the vendors at the farmers market, and they give me a lot of free produce as a regular.
Buying with plastic is a privilege -- externalizing the costs of cleaning your pollution to poorer communities and future generations.
I hope that we'll end subsidies that force me to pay for meat, other standard American diet ingredients I don't eat, and fossil fuels transporting foods across the country and around the world which would make prices reflect their costs.
I agree.
I think it's predominantly a matter of framing.
Imagine a person is sat in a car and they've just eaten a chocolate bar. The easiest thing for them to do at that moment is to throw the wrapper out of the window.
But most don't do that, they put it in a bag or whatever, collect it, and dispose of it properly.
There are tons of examples like this.
It's a 'burden or chore' to go to the toilet rather than just taking a shit at the side of the road. It's a 'burden or chore' to brush your teeth in the morning.
Except it's not - why? Framing.
If it's not on the spectrum of socially acceptable things to something, we won't do it.
Consider the opposite end of the spectrum - there are people who deliberately go out of their way to spend money and time for stuff like 'coal rolling'.
Do you want to pollute or not? You can start taking actions now, just think a bit more. No-one is perfect.
I already reduce my trash footprint, but for things like toothbrushes and floss, I haven't found a good alternative.
Waste could be slightly reduced in the toothbrush case with reusable heads, but a plastic handle once every few months isn't a huge deal.
I wish that, again, the bloody packaging wasn't so silly though. Just throw them all together in a box at the supermarket. We can sterilise it with boiling water at home if we care.
You now no longer live in a metropolis. You live in a town of maybe 15,000 people. The nearest Trader Joes is an hour drive away. Again, how easy it is?
You now are paid $15 an hour instead of what you are making. Is it sill not a burden?
I think people here need to really keep in mind how much life situations differ in the USA before they consider something to be a burden or not. A lot of people here at HN live like college students; very close to their work/study, no family, no children, and with generally small footprints in a closely clustered urban area that caters to them. Even the focus on metal work is the same.
It really changes if you aren't this type of person an yes it's a burden. You simply don't have the disposable time if you have kids for one, unless your wife is stay at home.
About the only example there you've given that sounds challenging is having "no free time with children". Everything else?
What does working 4-12 have to do with going to a farmer's market?
There's a lot of little things that add up to make any task much harder. People take things like having a fixed schedule or a workplace where everyone shows up regularly for granted; surprisingly little changes can make a goal like this a lot harder to do.
> I think people here need to really keep in mind how much life situations differ in the USA before they consider something to be a burden or not.
Might you have missed that such situations and their variety is what this addresses and helps?
I post here a lot despite not being in this places cohort because you guys really need to understand that a lot of the discussion and solutions have issues with people outside.
Ah yes, let me not write about, or even do anything else, ever, in my life, because some folk in the US of A are too "burdened".
[1] https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...
But we can do better, I've seen cucumbers with a 2nd outer plastic bag, you don't need that. All the packaging with mixed materials at the moment can't really be recycled, theres a huge amount of plastic packaged, and plastic made things, that don't need to be.
Its worth pointing out that lots of people are coming at this from different angles. Some people have seen Blue Planet and don't want to pollute the ocean, some people want a sustainable solution, and some people want a low/no co2 solution. Neither of these perfectly aligns. You're looking at it from a co2/energy point of view, there are others who see plastic as unsustainable because it can't be infinitely recycled, so the glass in still better.
It sounds like a significant challenge to do this outside of an urban environment that is well served with "alternative" retailers though.
A friend nearby, leading a similar suburban-supermarket lifestyle to me, tried a slightly different thing for a few months - all single use plastic was disposed of in a very visible location (a clear plastic (doh) sack in the kitchen) as a reminder of how much you've used. Apparently it was very shocking.
Other motivational ideas:
- any plastic you use goes to landfill. In your back yard.
- Collect all your plastic waste. Take the 10% that would on average (globally) end up in the ocean. Chop it up and add it to your meals. See if you like it as much as the seabirds and turtles do.
- Admit that any plastic you send to recycling is just going to get "recycled" into energy anyway. Incinerate it at home instead.
- 10% of the plastic I dispose of doesn’t end up in the ocean because I live in a civilised country that disposes of it in the places made for it’s disposal.
- Plastic is incinerated in special chambers that make sure everything burns to a simple combination of CO2+H2O, while your home probably doesn’t have the necessary equipment to do so.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-worlds-recycling-is-in-chaos...
https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2019/08/smart-plas...
- Nonetheless, the risk of harmful substances reaching the air may not be completely eliminated by engineers. In some countries, newer incinerators would apply air pollution control technologies, including fabric filters, electrostatic precipitators and scrubbers, the CIEL authors argue. However, these filters may not prevent all hazardous emissions, such as ultra-fine particles - unregulated and particularly harmful to health - from escaping into the air.
This was my uninformed understanding of incineration - that there's at least some toxic leftovers no matter how hot you burn it.
Is there really a way to burn it down to just CO2 and water ?
Even if it does end up in landfill, id be more confident of the rubbish actually staying in a landfill, than a shallow pit in the garden. What happens if a mouse finds and eats it? Its in the food chain. What happens if $burrowing_mammal digs it up?
Plus you're removing it from official figures. Some politician can look at the figures and declare "problem solved" when in fact it dispersed all over the country, and virtually impossible to fix.
Okay, you have to be joking now, right?
Edit: so you all think it’s better to incinerate plastic at home instead of the industrial plants that have methods to reduce pollution? Okay...
In Ontario, Chapmans ice cream (and other brands too, probably) is available in cardboard boxes which unfold, leaving you with a perfect rectangular block of ice cream sitting on a flat piece of cardboard.
Otherwise, ice cream generally comes in rectangular-oval tubs made of cardboard. The only plastic is in the rim of the lid.
You can also get no name "ice cream" in 4 litre plastic buckets, but that generally has so little cream it's technically "frozen dessert".
The hardest part for me would be milk. I buy milk by the gallon (usually a gallon per week), and my kids love to drink it. I make yogurt and occasionally make cheese, so we would probably not suffer too much if we can get milk relatively cheaply. Milk does come in cardboard containers, but I'm pretty sure they're lined with plastic, not wax, and I honestly don't know where to get milk in glass containers.
Meat would also be hard since it always comes shrink wrapped in plastic and I don't know how to get it otherwise. We have a butcher nearby that would probably work with us, so it's solvable.
Instead of trying to eliminate plastic, maybe I'll try this with eliminating all waste. Food scraps will go to the compost and packaging will need to be recyclable. It would be interesting to see what I can cut out that isn't recyclable.
The litmus test is does the packaging begin to break down after 10 or so minutes holding wet food, if yes then the packaging is likely just paper, i.e. cardboard, if it can sit in a fridge for 48 hours without issue it has plastic.
> Buying without plastic is a privilege. It’s the pricier goods that are plastic free.
Perhaps people still need to lead the way by first buying the more expensive, plastic free alternatives, before we see a real change, but to me this is still the biggest kicker. The article also says, "frozen food doesn’t depend on plastic to keep it fresh or to protect it from spoils". Is that true? What about vegetables (peas, sweetcorn etc.) I'm probably being thick, but what else do they come bagged in?
The wasted coated paper carton would be incinerated here, and used for electricity and heat.
Recycling cans is economically viable, so they aren't just going to be getting dumped, and the plastic isnt likely to escape in the mean time.
With respect to long term impact, we are better off taking other approaches. Reusable glass may sound great, until one realizes that they end up with mountains of glass in the place of mountains of plastic. While there are places that will take back glass jars for reuse, a lot of glass simply ends up being recycled. The actual issue is packaging.
To see how much of an issue this is, start saving the realistically reusable packaging instead of recycling it: glass jars, plastic tubs, cardboard boxes, etc.. For most people, the amount that they collect is in extreme excess of what they can reuse.
Getting back to the original point: don't fret over that plastic sprayed liner, plastic tub, or plastic bag. In a lot of cases, it serves a legitimate purpose. It is far better to think about what it says about us. The author illustrates that in the article. He discusses the impact of convenience meals in his life. He noticed that he was ordering a lot online rather than supporting local producers and vendors. The lessons that Hayes takes away from his experiment may be different what other people learn, yet they are lessons all the same.
I worked at a supermarket in high school and this was back when the glass 2-liter soda bottle was introduced (during the US's short-lived metric system push). And shortly afterwards, the 3-liter bottle was added. Since they were glass, when one fell off the shelf it was a huge mess (the 3-liters were significantly more delicate). Several times a week, we'd hear a smash, followed by "Wet clean-up on aisle 5"
We had a wire cage at the front of the store where you could return the bottles and get your deposit back. None of the employees liked dealing with it, as customers never rinsed their empties, so it attracted insects. Branding also entered into it, as the Pepsi deliveryman would only take Pepsi empties, and the Coca-Cola company only wanted theirs. So their route was delayed as they fished around for their bottles in the cage.
I think reducing the amount of plastic we use is an excellent goal. And it's possible today that people are as-or-more accepting of the extra work involved than they were in the 1970's. But I doubt that it'll gain widespread acceptance because plastic solves so many problems. So an incentive may be necessary, like deposits on plastic bottles & containers, to encourage people to return them (and they don't end up as litter)
In Denmark there are two categories of glass bottles with deposits. Particular types of drink must have a deposit on the bottle, and imported or smaller producers don't reuse the bottles. The biggest producers (e.g. Carlsberg, Coca Cola) wash and refill their bottles.
Here, plastic bottles and drinks cans are crushed and melted, but in Germany the largest users of plastic bottles (Coca Cola etc) use sturdier bottles, which are washed and refilled.
Depending on where you live, it can be pretty hard to find non-plastic alternatives for some products; for example: unless you have a butcher that will give you meat served in butcher paper, your meat is probably stored in plastic. However, many things are easy to eliminate, such as low quality cooking oils stored in plastic. It's easy to find olive, avocado, coconut, mct, and other cooking oils in glass containers and to use those (and butter) instead of canola, soy, or vegetable oils.
Do what's reasonable personally for your and your family's health, and advocate for bans and restrictions on environmental plastics in your countries, as that's really the only long-term solution.
If not recycled they go to landfill and stay there, buried. No greenhouse gas emissions, no ocean pollution.
If one wanted put efforts into ecology one would be more productive reconsidering their commute options - each commute trip in a car is a gallon of gas that goes straight to CO2.
The supermarket that currently has thousands of individual plastic bottles could have a big tank with a tap on it.
It sounds more like a trust thing. You need to know that the water is safe. If you know it's safe, you're good.