In the last article we began tackling plastic pollution by reducing the amount of plastic we buy in the first place. This week we’ll look at the other two aspects of the ‘3Rs’ rule for tackling waste: reusing and recycling.
Reusing.
Reusing is just another way of reducing the amount of new plastic you bring into your life. It’s a specific way to reduce your plastic consumption at source, and I’ve found it really effective in terms of the volume of plastic it takes out of my bin.
When I looked in my recycling bin I realised just how many products we buy that come in plastic bottles. The biggest offenders in my bin were the bottles associated with two types of cleaning: first – showering/ people washing/ hand-sanitising activities, and secondly, products for cleaning all sorts of household surfaces. In June 2020 I began reusing all the cleaning product bottles in my kitchen and bathroom and I’m still using the same bottles now.
Here’s what I’ve learned from that process.
‘The Devil is in the detail…’
The most valuable aspect of the process was ‘getting a visual’ on the sheer volume of plastic waste our household was responsible for creating each month just from plastic product bottles. Here are two pictures of the plastic bottles I’ve been reusing:
There are 9 bottles in total. For 5 of them I used to buy replacement bottles of the product about twice a month (10 bottles per month into the bin). For the other 4 items, I bought replacements every week: (16 more waste bottles each month).
26 bottles a month, 312 a year: that mounts up to a lot of plastic. This site https://www.omnicalculator.com/ecology/plastic-footprint told me I’d been creating 32.6kgs of plastic waste each year- just from product bottles associated with basic activities like showering and cleaning surfaces.
Realising that my family was responsible for discarding this weight of raw material annually was an eye-opener for me. I highly recommend you take time one day to calculate your own plastic footprint just from the product bottles you buy regularly. And when you’ve got your total, spend a moment visualising what it means in the real world.
I found knowing my own total, and having a visual sense of what it meant, was useful in practical ways. I imagined about 300 bottles, all gathered into a net, then dumped from a helicopter into one of the Great Pacific garbage patches. I imagined all ‘my’ bottles swirling around in there, and a big baleen whale approaching from below…..
You can go as far as you want with this: the point is- having a visual on the size of your personal plastic pile can be a big motivator for sticking to a reusing routine that beautifully by-passes bottles.
Where to get refills.
The last article discussed the refill shops where you can buy unpackaged grocery goods that would normally come in single use plastics (sups), and those shops usually also supply refills of the products we’re discussing today. Check the ‘resources’ menu above for the refill outlet closest to you. The following sources- specific to cleaning products- are also useful.
In Ireland the Tru eco company is rolling out a refill network which will be supplied with 20 litre drums of product that can be collected, washed, refilled and reused, so creating a circular economy. Their products are made in Ireland so they come with fewer transport miles than many other ranges. True eco cleaning products are claimed to be plant-based, vegan friendly, cruelty free and septic tank safe. You can check out this range, and find the Tru eco refill outlet closest to you, here:
https://vivagreengroup.com/product-category/tru-eco-range/
This site doesn’t work in Northern Ireland yet- but maybe that can be fixed?
In Northern Ireland and the UK generally the Ecover range is a possible alternative for refills of these items. You can find their outlets here https://www.ecover.com/where-can-i-refill/
Ecover’s products are also claimed to be plant-based, vegan friendly and cruelty free, however, you should be aware that since December 2017 Ecover has been owned by consumer goods giant SC Johnson, and this parent company doesn’t have the same cruelty free credentials as the original Ecover brand used to have. In fact there is a call for a boycott of the SC Johnson company, including its Ecover and Method brands, because of animal testing issues. You can read more about this here: Ecover and Method Boycott | Ethical Consumer and make your own call about it.
Water bottle refills….
It’s a particular irritation for many people when they find that a single-use plastic water bottle has crept back into their recycling bins. It’s exasperating to see them there because we’ve all known for years just how wasteful and damaging these things are, and so many of us have tried so hard to leave them behind us! The evidence of our concern is right there in the collections of reusable bottles and cups that gather in our kitchens and our cars! So why does this especially pernicious form of plastic pollution keep turning up in our recycling???
The answer may be that no policy measures are being implemented to stop them from being produced in the first place, and there are still no serious plans to ban single use plastic bottles in Ireland any time soon: Plastic bottle review more ‘time-wasting’ from Government .
The UK government is equally dilatory: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/plans-unveiled-to-ban-single-use-plastics Spoiler! – sup water bottles are NOT on its list of ‘soon’-to-be-banned items either.
So, when yet another water bottle appears in your bin, don’t get too mad at yourself- or at least get mad at these procrastinating government greenwashers while you’re at it!
Below are some more pragmatic steps you might also take to keep these invaders out of your bin.
“Get your refills here….”
We all know the scenario: we carry our reusable bottles faithfully in our bags, but we forget to refill with fresh water before leaving the house and it feels awkward to ask for a refill from a random shop when you’re out. But- the Refill campaign, run by Bristol based not-for-profit company ‘City-to-Sea’, enlists all sorts of businesses to offer free refills of tap water to the public. The businesses let passersby know refills are available from them by posting the Refill sticker in their windows- it looks something like this:
So look out for these stickers and if you do pass one, do go in and get your refill there: after all- you’ve been invited! If you don’t come upon a sticker, the refill app helps you find water refill stations in your town or, indeed, anywhere in the world, as well as coffee shops that offer discounts to people who present a reusable cup. On this island you can find the app at Refill Northern Ireland – Refill – Preventing waste in Northern Ireland and in Ireland its https://refill.ie/ For other countries check https://www.refill.org.uk/
So, finally, we can put our ‘reusables’ collections to good use!
Recycling.
Recycling is a good idea in principle because it allows us to recover and re-use the materials embodied in the recyclable items we dispose of – like plastic bottles and cardboard boxes. Reusing materials that have already been extracted, harvested or produced in a ‘first round’ manufacturing process reduces our demand for new raw materials- and that’s a valuable thing to do. So for example, cutting our demand for new plastic bottles reduces the need to extract more oil, (the raw material they’re made from), and that allows more carbon to stay in the ground where it does no harm.
As well as reducing demand for new raw materials, recycling allows us to get more value out of existing materials. We can use the same raw materials to make completely new and different things, so the life of these materials is extended and the economic returns on them are increased.
So, in principle, recycling is a brilliant idea, and that may be why many of us really haven’t minded how much plastic we buy ‘just as long as it’s recyclable”. But when you investigate recycling more closely, it’s clear that this ‘use away’ attitude really is dangerous.
There are not many good things to say about recycling as it has been practised by wealthy western nations in recent years. That’s because the bulk of what we put into our recycling bins wasn’t reused at home as we might have expected. In fact it was sold and exported, generally to poorer countries, who bought it for reprocessing and as a way of recovering the residual value of our discarded raw materials.
The film, ‘Plastic China’, https://vimeo.com/ondemand/plasticchina tells you everything you need to know about the human impacts of the unregulated recycling businesses that grew up in poorer countries to do this materials recovery work. In the film the ugly, nature-less, literal ‘waste-land’ that this industry creates, engulfs the bright and beautiful Yi-Jie- the eleven year old girl at the heart of the story. We watch as the healthy, happy link between her and an earlier phase of her life – one where she remembers her Grandmother, greenery and animals- gets stretched and frayed. We see how the economics of her family may well cause that link to break and fade out of her life forever. We hope for the best for her- but the forces eroding her life potential are complex and strong…
China stopped importing most wastes in January 2018, but the dirty business of wealthy countries exporting their trash still goes on – as this article shows Where does your plastic go? Global investigation reveals America’s dirty secret | Recycling | The Guardian
Although the article mentions America, it is not the only wealthy country that continues to export as much of its ‘plastic problem’ as it can manage: Ireland still does exactly the same thing- see What really happens to our recycling?
But markets for discarded recyclables are reducing. Soon all wealthy nations will have to deal with our own waste – and not a moment before time!
From the point of view of anyone trying to do the right thing about the plastics that currently show up in their own lives, the message is simple. ‘Don’t let ‘recycling’ become your permission for unlimited consumption of plastic.’
For a long time that comforting recycle symbol felt like a ‘get out of jail free’ card. It suggested that it was just fine to use as much plastic as we wanted to because, in the end, we’d ‘put it into recycling’ and it would all get made into some nice, clean, pain-free ‘new thing’, and no harm would be done along the way.
But the harm was done: look at Yi-Jie, and look at the Great Pacific garbage patches which you can read about here: https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/great-pacific-garbage-patch-isnt-what-you-think/
Like it or not, ‘recycling’ in the current ‘wealthy-nations’ way, means facilitating the continuation of these wrongs. Providing solutions for those wrongs cannot be done at the individual level, so we will look at how they might be addressed in a collective way in the next blog piece- our first ‘Why don’t we’ article.
In the meantime, in the context of working within individual life-spheres, the best we can do is to mitigate the scale of the problems that the overuse of plastic creates. We can do that by treating recycling as the absolute ‘last resort’ option. So when addressing your own plastic waste, always exhaust the ‘reduce’ and ‘reuse’ options first.
Make a clean sweep of it!
That brings me, almost, to the end of the story of my personal war on plastic. Except that when I looked in my bins after the first fortnight of battle, I found …plastic! These were quite specific items that hadn’t succumbed to my initial broad brush attacks, so I had to devise a special clean-up operation just to sort these ‘bad boys’ out!
Here’s a roll call of what they were: coffee pods; a big swathe of plastic that once held 18 toilet rolls together in a multi-pack; 2 other big swathes of plastic that came from the dry-cleaning and ironing service that I use for certain textiles.
So here’s what happened to the bad boys who lived in my bin…
1. Coffee Pods:
The coffee machine got replaced by a simple coffee maker like this one.
It uses ground coffee and a simple built-in filter mechanism. It doesn’t produce the crema that some people like- though other coffee machines I looked at do produce that and just with the ground coffee- no plastic pod required. So you do have plastic free alternatives- whatever type of coffee you like.
I found this type of coffee maker in a supermarket. It was cheap to buy, it’s strong, endlessly reusable and it’s double-skinned so it keeps our coffee warm for a long time- perfect if you linger over coffee. Result: no more plastic pods- √
2. Plastic from toilet roll multipack:
Here’s a conundrum. Toilet roll is a paper product made in a factory that makes… paper products. So I looked in the supermarket for a multipack of locally produced toilet rolls that were held together by …. paper. In fact I looked in two supermarkets, but all I could find were multipacks wrapped in… plastic! Why? …
I could not find any plastic-free toilet roll produced by any company on this island, or indeed by any company anywhere, that was being sold in either of the two different supermarkets closest to me. So I had to go online to find it- and here it is: https://oceansplasticfree.com/about/
This company now delivers a cardboard box-full of entirely plastic free toilet paper to me each month- and I use the cardboard in my garden beds and compost heap. I chose this company because its more local to me, but there were other strong contenders online like these guys:
https://eu.whogivesacrap.org/pages/about-us
And I’m sure you can find many others to choose from. If you ever find a company that makes this product in Northern Ireland or in Ireland- do let us know at [email protected] and we’ll happily advertise it in our resources section.
But for now, that’s the second bad boy out of my bin √
3. The dry-cleaner’s plastic wrapper.
I spoke to Terry about this. He’s the person who picks up any dry-cleaning and ironing I may have and returns it, clean and pressed, three days later in it’s shiny plastic coverings. I asked him if he could bring mine back without any covering. Terry wasn’t keen on that because of the risk the laundry would get dirty or creased in transit. But he assured me that his company uses a specialist local recycler specifically for this type of plastic and for this industry. They recycle the plastic that the cleaning is sent out in, and also any metal hangers that get damaged, and then they re-supply these products back to their customers. Terry tells me that lots of people send their plastic and hangers back for this purpose.
So, for now, when I take the plastic off my returned laundry I do it carefully so the same plastic can be reused directly for my next batch of laundry without needing to be reprocessed. I put it back into the bottom of the reusable bag that my laundry gets picked up in, and I hope that I’ll get the same plastic back next time, so at least it won’t be a single-use villain. If it happens to get torn or damaged I still send it back, trusting that it will be recycled right here on this island, as Terry tells me it is.
So that’s the third bad boy banished from my bin.√
How effective are these changes?
Eighteen months on from the start of my battle with plastic most of the changes I made have become permanent and they continue to pay off in reduced plastic waste in my bins. The victory hasn’t been total: I still produce about one black bag of landfill waste per fortnight and there’s usually some soft plastic in there because those plastics aren’t recycled in my area. But one bag of landfill is much better than the three bags I used to create, and that were made up mostly of soft plastic waste. And my recycling bin is also much lighter than it used to be.
I hope you’re encouraged enough to take up the cudgels in the struggle against excess plastic. There’s still plenty of enemy to go around and every one of us is needed to help beat it!
Viv,
Living Hopefully,
© livinghopefully.org
Photo by by John Cameron john-cameron-FMrZLPdDyx4-unsplash.jpg