Christine Jeavans
I am giving up plastic for the whole of August. By this I mean not buying or accepting anything which contains plastic or is packaged in plastic. So, no take-away coffees, bottles of water or pre-packed sandwiches.
I’ll be forsaking punnets of strawberries and packs of chicken, supermarket milk and bottled cleaning products, and switching to reusable nappies for my toddler.
No longer will my other half and I be able to slump in front of the telly of an evening with the latest DVD, a takeaway curry and a bottle of wine (the cork could be plastic). I am, if you like, donning a polyester-free hairshirt – with the aim of seeing how possible it is to live without new plastic.
I will, however, be keeping the plastic I already own. But even so, it’s going to be very difficult.
Durable, versatile, lightweight, hygienic, cheap and strong: synthetic plastic is arguably one of the most useful inventions of the last century. It is essential in medical equipment, technology and thousands of devices which have increased our standard of living. But those very same attributes of durability and cheapness make plastic one of the most pervasive forms of waste on the planet.
Evidence of our failure to deal with plastic rubbish is everywhere, from bulging landfill sites and countryside litter in the UK to a toxic plastic “soup” swilling around the middle of the North Pacific, thousands of miles from continental land.