Reducing Plastic Part 2

I'm back from my epic 10 day work & yoga trip. I came home with a raging head cold as well as a lot of beautiful and gratifying lessons learned. I'll write more about the ahimsa practice tomorrow. I was mostly successful, but the failures teach as much as the successes, so I'm going to share them even though I wish I could pretend they hadn't happened. 

For now, though, I am continuing to chronicle our household efforts to reduce plastic usage. 

The month of February has been all about groceries and it has been an interesting challenge.

I know that whatever we’re doing to reduce plastic around groceries is in part an illusion. Buy things in bulk and use paper bags? Sure! Feel good about that! But probably the bulk bins were filled from large plastic bags of those products. So maybe I’m helping reduce by avoiding single-serving plastic, but there’s still plastic involved. I have no idea how far that extends into the food chain. I’m mindful of it, and the fact that there’s no easy answer given how our food system works. I’m just going to do my best.

I had a quick plan for approaching groceries:

• Get really rigorous about bringing my own bags to the grocery store and not using plastic produce bags (which are mostly unnecessary anyway).
• Figure out what we can easily substitute (for example flour is readily available in paper bags, but sometimes I would buy it in plastic because I liked the ziptop).
• Whatever we can’t substitute – decide whether to keep buying it or eliminate it from our diet. We aren’t going to get to zero waste.

We have made progress, but there’s still a lot to do. And everything turned out to be more complicated than I thought. For example, I thought we could buy most of our dry goods in the bulk section, and forego any plastic (beans, flour, cereals, etc.). But the first time I tried this at both our local food coop and Whole Foods, they only had plastic bags in the bulk area. So I had to buy a package of paper lunchbags (packed in plastic) to be able to buy bulk items without plastic.

And so much produce is packaged with plastic. Every individual apple has a plastic sticker on it. I wanted to buy green beans – packaged in plastic. Try going to the grocery store to buy grapes without using plastic. And other things I like to buy are more convenient or cheaper when you buy the plastic mesh bag – like onions and oranges and grape tomatoes. Lots of decisions to make and reckoning to do with what really matters.

Here’s my catalogue of our efforts in the grocery world.

Things that worked:

• Bringing our own bags to the grocery store and using plastic bags for produce only when we have to. Mo brought home brussels sprouts in a plastic bag yesterday – there was no other way. Over time I want to buy or make some cloth bags for situations where we can opt out of plastic, but sometimes there’s no option.
• Avoiding produce packaged in plastic. Yes it is easier to buy the bag of onions or potatoes or packaged tomatoes, but different versions of those products are available without the bag. You just have to choose it.
• Olive oil. We started buying the big tin container of olive oil and keeping it in a glass jar on the counter. It’s something we use every day so it feels good to have a reminder of one concrete area of success.
• Eggs. Why buy the plastic carton when cardboard is right next to it on the shelf? Only because we didn’t think of that and the plastic seemed more convenient. So easy to choose something better!
• Condiments – we use a lot of mustard and usually buy the plastic squeeze bottle. Turns out you can still get Grey Poupon in a glass jar, so we’re going fancy.
• Everything we can possibly buy bulk, packaged in our self-provided paper bags: flour, sugar, dried beans, nuts, fruit, oatmeal. We’re still discovering all the possibilities.
• Bread – most commercial bread is packaged in plastic. Sometimes I make my own, and I guess I will do more of that now. This weekend, I came home exhausted from my work trip and we just made a quick stop at the fancy bread bakery for a loaf packaged in brown paper. Delicious too!
• Spices. We have so many spice bottles we never need buy another one. So that means buying spices in the bulk section as much as possible. We have loved shopping at Penzey’s – for the quality of spices but also their political alignment with our values – but their bulk spices are usually packaged in plastic ziplocs. So we have to sort that out but I think there will be a way.
• Bottled drinks. In the past we would sometimes buy vitamin water, or diet soda in a plastic bottle. That is about the easiest thing in the world to give up. We don’t buy bottled water for every day, but we’ll have to think about this when we do special events with family where we usually get bottled water for convenience. I think plastic bottles are pretty much the worst, and the most visible symbol of how so-called convenience has trumped all common sense. So I’m happy to take on that challenge.
• Veggie broth. We used to buy this in the cardboard carton but it is obviously coated in plastic. Mark Bittman says veggie broth is wasted money anyway, because you can easily make your own, better, using odds and ends and scraps of stuff you probably have around the house. So we are now committing to making a big batch every month or so and keeping it in the freezer.

Where we have to make hard decisions:

• We buy a lot of tortillas. I had this great idea that I’d just start making our tortillas – which I have done successfully in the past. But the first batch turned out awful. Tough, crunchy, flavorless. And I made a lot of them. So I’m not sure what to do. I’m going to try a different recipe and see if I can do better. It seems like the main culprit is my desire to have a low-fat, low-cal tortilla. And that leads me to be suspicious of the ingredients in the low-fat, low-cal store-bought ones. Maybe it is better to give those up altogether, with or without the plastic consideration.
• Cheese. I can’t see anyway to buy cheese without plastic and I don’t see us giving it up.
• Veggie sausages. I love Morningstar farms veggie patties but a few years ago they switched from paper boxes to plastic bags. I have searched high and low for veggie sausages not packaged in plastic. The best I can find is veggie links in a paper box, but with a plastic bag liner. It seems like less plastic? But through this whole search I started reading the labels and those links are chock full of sodium, among other things. So this might be something we just have to give up. Alas. But also good.

So we’re still working on it. One thing that has been great about this whole process is that, regardless of how we’re doing on the plastic consumption, it is helping us be more thoughtful about our whole kitchen. We cleaned out the pantry and switched everything into glass jars in preparation for bulk purchasing and now it looks so much nicer. We started thinking more about what’s in the stuff we buy, not just what it’s packaged in. Those are ancillary benefits I didn’t anticipate. We also decided to join a CSA this summer. We have tried that in the past but it never worked for us, mostly because we didn’t put a priority on figuring out how to use the produce we got. Sometimes it was too much of one thing. Or it was a weird thing we weren’t used to eating. Or all the food went bad before we got around to cooking. It feels like a good time to revisit that. And hopefully our CSA won’t put each individual vegetable in a plastic bag.

One last benefit – readers of the blog have sent me suggestions, so now I have options for no-plastic razors and dental floss, and minimal-plastic toothbrushes. If you have grocery ideas I haven’t discovered, please send them! It is great to hear that other people are also finding ways to reduce plastic in your lives, so share those stories. Our nieces decided to give up straws after we started talking about how destructive they are. The point isn't to be perfect or pure, just to do what we can, and to support each other to try to make different choices. 

That’s the February plastic update. I think for March, instead of tackling the next category on my list, we’ll just work on consolidating and improving what we’re already doing. That means getting better at groceries and continuing to work on bathroom products, and starting to make plans for other things that are going to run out soon. Stay tuned - cleaning products are on the horizon!

With love, gratitude and solidarity forever.