The future is now
“I just want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening?” Yes, he is listening. He is the clueless, innocent, and soon-to-seduced Benjamin Braddock in the 1967 movie, The Graduate. Mr. McGuire, a family friend, has taken him aside to impart wisdom.
“Plastics,” McGuire tells Benjamin. “There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it.”
Okay, let’s think about it.
Every year, nations worldwide produce around 350 million metric tons of plastic waste—the equivalent of more than 10 million fully loaded garbage trucks. Most of this plastic waste ends up polluting our air, land, and oceans.
No! You say. I am not part of this problem! I dutifully put my plastic in a specially marked recycle bin (next to glass, metal, paper). Me too. More than half of collectors and recycling centers take plastic. However, 95 percent of that plastic is not, in fact, recycled. It is treated as garbage.
Plastic recycling is “an abysmal failure” and “a dead-end street.” Prior to 2018 we thought we were recycling plastic because we sent it all to China. What China did with it, who knows. But that country no longer takes our plastic. We ship some to our neighbors, Canada and Mexico, but mostly we dump it. Twenty percent of landfill garbage is plastic garbage.
Want to know your “plastic footprint”? Check this out.
My personal footprint is not great. My most egregious plastic use comes from buying lettuces and spinach in those flimsy clamshell containers. They are huge. They are single-use. My grocery store used to have big open bins of greenery with tongs you could use to take what you want and put in biodegradable bags. No more.
In an effort to do at least one small thing, I’ve decided to grow my own salad greenery and sprouts indoors during all those months that are too cold and too rainy for the garden. This is not going to save me money. I have purchased shelving, grow lights, special seedling soil, soil amendments, and a pretty rice-paper screen to hide the operation from view. But it is going to save me a smidgen of environmental angst. No more clamshell containers! And the idea of sauntering from the kitchen to the living room and picking greens for a salad in January? That’s priceless.