There will be times when it takes two days to create a blog...my goal of a post a day every day except Sunday may occasionally not be met...
OK, so yesterday I heard the tail end of a radio ad for an association or company whose goal is a reduction in plastic waste, solving the "problem" of plastic waste, or words to that effect. Please understand, whoever they are (I didn't hear the full ad), I'm not critical of them. Heck, I am glad that someone understands that this is an issue.
But, grrr....anyway.
Several years ago, I wrote that I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during the early corporate meetings where plastic was discussed, no doubt as the miracle of the twentieth century. Someone, even a mere secretary or low-echelon executive, must have coughed politely and said, "Excuse me, but how will this material be disposed of? Given that it is not compostable, it will soon fill our landfills and bodies of water." No doubt this naysayer was quickly silenced, and industry went full steam ahead, thrilled with the millions of uses for plastic and the potential for profit. Fast forward sixty years or so, and it is literally everywhere, clogging land and sea, cramming our homes and stores. It is even inside the bodies of people who have had knee replacements and other medical intervention, and to some extent, in all of us through our drinking water and consumption of food that has been wrapped in plastic.
Compared with many people, I am already almost off the map. I don't own a house or car, don't have small children (thus I rarely buy toys), and don't use anything but a few over-the-counter pharmaceuticals and toiletries. I don't produce plastic, or work for a company distributing plastic products or products sold in plastic. I use just about as little of the substance as is humanly possible, much of it making it into appropriate recycling. Yet that is still too much, too much, too much. There are so many unrecyclable little plastic doohickeys; the little square things that close plastic bread bags, many dental floss containers, old toothbrushes and ballpoint pens...
The point has come where I become so anxious looking at store shelves, I can barely get out of the place without tears. The amount of plastic in one store alone can be seen as an affront to Mother Nature, and is a "problem" with no solution. As I walk through the aisles, my mind then multiplies one store by millions of others around the globe, and the countless plastic bags, containers, and objects going out the door and into our natural environment in some form or another. It is completely overwhelming.
The "solution" to the problem of plastic waste would probably have had to come at the birth of the plastic era. Wiser heads would have chosen to proceed cautiously, knowing that disposal issues needed to be dealt with at the outset. A truly wise system doesn't deliberately create problems that then must be solved in future years with great save-the-day fanfare.
Talk about not being able to breathe...earth, increasingly, cannot breathe. I genuinely hope for the miracle of a brilliant manmade "solution". But I also hope those pursuing the goal are being honest with themselves about the scope and urgency of the task. I hope they are being honest with themselves that our plastic-fueled "normal" is not sustainable. (Plastic, of course, is not the only pollutant...)
In a future post, I'll talk about this more from the standpoint of all of us, the consumers. There will be an excruciatingly hard moment when most people will recognize the imperative of making different purchasing/investment/usage choices; there will be a moment where we make the choice between facing our individual responsibility, and burying our discomfort yet again. Life as we know it will change regardless. And in the midst of it all, no matter how much or little we have depended on plastic and how small or large a muck-up we have made of it all, Mother Nature loves us unconditionally. That, I know.
