The Plastic Reduction Project: March Report

March has been a challenging month for our household plastic reduction project. It has actually been a little discouraging.

The yoga sutras warn that obstacles arise in pursuit of the spiritual path and the key is finding ways to address them when they do. One of them is inertia – which I think is a huge factor in trying to give up plastic. Everything around us encourages, insists on the use of plastic. The easiest course of action is to follow that encouragement and just take it. Another obstacle is backsliding, or failing to maintain what has been gained. Also an important obstacle to notice and avoid when trying to make new habits

I’m trying to be vigilant about attacking those obstacles. I know from yoga practice that not being able to do something fully is a stage on the path to doing it fully and that mapping out that path requires taking a full inventory of what is working and not working.

So here’s my assessment of March’s  plastic usage.

The success we had in January and February was due to three things. It was all new and we had enthusiasm and momentum for the task. We focused on things that we only buy intermittently – shampoo, soap, teeth cleaning. You buy that stuff once, and then it is months before you need to buy it again. It was fun to do research and find alternatives and every option that arose created a little buzz and endorphin loop that increased the desire to do more.

In February/March it’s been food – groceries and eating out. Groceries and eating out is not a once-in-awhile thing. It is every day, or at least every week. There are a million opportunities to implement your goals or fail to do so.

I’ve identified four categories of mistakes. Each one has its own set of solutions.

1. Mistakes I made – forgetting to ask the waiter not to bring straws out, forgetting to bring paper bags for buying bulk foods. Solution: redouble my efforts, stay focused on the underlying values, don’t lose heart.
2. Mistakes other people made – like when the checker at the supermarket let me bag all my own groceries in my own bags, and then inexplicably took the eggs and put them in a separate single-use plastic bag before I could stop her. Or even better: when dining out, I remembered to ask the waiter not to bring me a straw. He forgot, but then saw me when walking across the dining room with our tray of drinks, and took the straw out of mine and threw it in the trash. So it still went in the landfill even though I didn’t use it. Arrggghhhh! Solution: anticipate that these will happen, be firmly and compassionately insistent and then forgiving. We all make mistakes; we’re all doing our best!
3. The purchases for which we haven’t found a non-plastic alternative. Like tortillas – which I bought after almost a month without. Or grapes – three times now. Or brown sugar. Some of that seems unavoidable, but some of it is category 1 mistakes. I don’t want to concede that there may be no alternative. For now, I’m saying we haven’t found it yet. Solution: keep researching options. As we make fewer mistakes with the things we CAN control, there will be more energy for moving into the more challenging areas.
4. And the fourth category – when I just give in. Like buying diet soda in a bottle because I’m tired and I want one and plastic is the only option. Solution: make a note of it, understand why it happened and how you might do it differently next time, and move on.

 In Iyengar yoga, we pay a lot of attention to sequencing and understanding how students can learn – moving from easier poses to harder ones. Sequencing is based on the idea that you can culture your mind/body consciousness to understand at subtler and subtler levels, and then to move from the grossest physical actions to the subtlest physical actions and then to the inner most consciousness. I think the idea of sequencing is helpful for thinking about my plastic project – at first I’m just getting rid of the grossest, most obvious, easiest uses. Then it comes to tackling the more challenging ones. In yoga, the evolution of consciousness can be self-reinforcing. First you do certain things because you know they’re right; over time, that repeated action takes root at a physical and metaphysical level; at some point you don’t have to think about doing the right thing – it is ingrained in you at a deep level and you no longer have any interest in doing things that were previously challenging to avoid.

Over and over again the yoga sutras lay out this idea.

11.28 talks about how the practice of the 8 limbs of yoga burns away impurities and creates discriminative discernment.

11.40 says that when the student is firmly established in practicing cleanliness (saucha), they lose all interest in using other people for self-gratification.

II.43 talks about how tapas – vigorous discipline – perfects the senses and the body.

And there are a number of sutras in the third chapter about the more advanced practices, especially meditation, and how they help the consciousness evolve.

Basically, the whole point is keep practicing and over time you’ll develop subtler levels of sensitivity and from that awareness and refined consciousness you’ll make better choices.

So we keep going.

In April I have two medium-length work trips. Travel is perhaps the hardest time to resist plastic. It seems almost impossible to avoid buying food in airports or quick grocery trips that don’t involve plastic, especially when work travel means I don’t have an array of my own carry-out containers and I can’t avoid having to eat out. I’m going to keep trying to make the right choices – bring my own food when I can, make the best choices I can when I have to eat prepared foods.

I can see that it is going to take the whole year to create and entrench new habits. But it still feels like a worthwhile project.

With love, gratitude and solidarity forever.