The Two Greatest Swaps You Can Make

When you make sustainability a part of your life, one of the first things you learn is that plastic is both a blessing and a curse. Its use has benefited human health in the medical field. It comes in handy after natural disasters when you need to distribute a lot of food and water quickly. Many products that we keep for extended periods, such as our vehicles and electronic devices use it. But it's also a curse: all the plastic that has ever, EVER been created still exists in some shape or form. It will be with us even longer!

That is scary. To wane ourselves from plastic will be difficult. Admittedly, it's useful, convenient, and addicting. If going cold-turkey is too much, then at the very least, our initial focus could be to reduce or eliminate single-use plastic. Examples of single-use plastic include plastic straws, plastic wrap, plastic water and soda bottles, and plastic grocery bags (both veggie bags and the bags to carry the groceries out). Indeed, if we were to commit to do something today to reduce the single-use plastic in our lives, the two greatest swaps we could make are to:

• Replace plastic water bottles with a reusable stainless steel water bottle
• Bring reusable bags to the grocery store

Bring Your Own Bottle

Worldwide, we use over a million plastic bottles per minute in total. Americans alone buy about 50 billion plastic water bottles per year. That averages out to about 13 bottles per month for every person in the US. Even though those plastic bottles are often recyclable, less than 10% ever are. Most end up in landfills, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Replace your plastic water bottle with a reusable water bottle (ideally, stainless steel, but use what you have) and save an average of 156 plastic bottles annually. If you're a soda drinker, designate a container for soda and use it to fill up at the fountain.

A membership at Costco (or any of the Big Box Stores) encourages you to buy in bulk. Strolling down the water aisle, you will see high- and low-end sourced water packaged in plastic bottles and plastic wrapping offered at enticing deal prices. (Our ancestors are probably turning over in their graves at the thought of having to pay for water.) The marketers tout the purity of water sourced from a spring, the convenience of storing water this way against a disaster, and the sanitary benefit of passing out plastic water bottles at parties—not to mention the ease of cleanup. The reality is that tap water is more regulated for purity than bottled water. Even though the bottle often says it's from a freshwater spring source, how is the average consumer to know for sure?

The environmental price for indiscriminate plastic water bottle use is too high. Make a commitment today to bring your own reusable bottle with you everywhere you go.

Bring Your Own Bag

Earthday.org says:

Five trillion plastic bags are produced worldwide annually. It can take up to 1,000 years for a bag to disintegrate completely. Americans throw away 100 billion bags annually– that’s the equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of crude oil! By switching to reusable shopping bags, we can eliminate that waste– which amounts to about 307 bags per person.

In my family, we have kept our plastic bags from the grocery store and used them as waste bin liners. That does extend the life of the bag one degree by upcycling it for a purpose, instead of just tossing it. But in the end, it still ends up in the landfill, and any biodegradable waste wrapped in that layer of plastic ends up producing methane, which adds to the pollution problem. For some additional insights, check out "The Life Cycle of a Plastic Bag."

If you have tubes full of plastic bags, then stuff some in your car, bag, purse, wherever, so that you can use them instead of new bags when you're at the store. Alternatively, find one of those swag bags you have lying around to take to the store with you. Finally, purchase some reusable bags made of cloth or recyclable materials that you can fold up and take with you places. But do your best to avoid introducing new plastic bags into your life.

I have been trying this for several months now and it's gone well enough. I am the oddball with his reusable bags, but the store clerks are very obliging to use my bags if I'm not checking out on my own. The couple of times I have forgotten bags, I have fined myself by buying the store's reusable bags. The tricky thing is the veggie section because that introduces another layer of plastic bags. You can be creative here and bring your own makeshift veggie bags or you can buy some reusable ones specifically made for that purpose. I save them for fruits and vegetables that I have to keep together. Otherwise, for bigger veggies, knowing that I'm going to clean them very well before I eat them, I just put in the cart.

Make the swap today and reduce your plastic bag use.

What has your experience been with bringing your own reusable bottle and bags?