Beth Terry's done some amazing work over at fakeplasticfish.com. I hugely recommend her site to anyone wondering what the heck I might mean when I talk about becoming a better person. See, plastic is everywhere, and yet most of it doesn't really go anywhere, except into the trash. Oh sure, there's recycling too, but who are we kidding that anything actually gets recycled? See, that's the trick of it: the false sense of normalcy that our disposable society has set up for us. "Recycling" is way more energy-intensive than just building something reusable that lasts longer, but that's not going to make everyone as much money, so...it's got to be disposable. Those values, and their long-term consequences, go unquestioned by almost all of us, except for Beth and like-minded bloggers.
Beth's decided to chronicle her plastic waste while trying to constantly reduce it AND maintain a semi-sane life. Not all that easy, honestly, but because of her efforts we can learn how to take some of the same steps ourselves. I've already been using a stainless water bottle for two years and bringing my own bags to the grocery store regularly since 2006 (when I got addicted to the nickel they'd knock off my grocery bill at Whole Foods -score!). But there's always more that can be done, and there's bigger questions that are raised by each of these small steps, and that seems to be more and more what Beth has been addressing this year. Food for thought.
What do you do about the little bits of trash that might be clogging up our landfills and oceans?
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