It’s “Plastic Free July!” This promotion of a life without plastic was begun in Australia in 1911 and has grown to be an international movement. Why should you go plastic free? It’s partly for doing a bit toward saving the environment from the tons of plastic discarded that takes thousands of years to decompose and is choking our oceans. But it’s also a matter of health. Consumer Reports June 2020 article on “How to Eat Less Plastic” lays out how the chemicals in plastic can leach into the foods wrapped and stored in them. Ingesting these chemicals can have a serious effect on health. Add to this the 74,000 bits of micro plastic that every American breathes in or ingests every year, and we have a major problem.
While it may seem very hard to avoid using plastic, there are plenty of resources on how to do it. Start with Katie Well’s Blog. She gives a lot of links to plastic alternative products. I like to shop at second-hand stores for glass jars and containers to store foods. When shopping, I try to avoid buying any food in plastic containers, and I save, wash and reuse most of the glass containers of food I buy. I have found Eco Bags to be a good source for cloth shopping bags of many sizes. You will also want to look at the “Shopping” section of the resources published in the June 24 Creation Care post.
It may seem a challenge at first, but it is possible to rather easily avoid single-use plastic, and to gradually rid your kitchen of plastic products. I’ve been working on it for a year. Not quite there yet, but getting closer.
~Elliott J Bush
