If you could un-invent something, what would it be?
I’m a ‘70s kid. Reality was very different back then. Even though I lived in a big city, I remember the milkman passing through our street. He didn’t have many customers, though. For example, we were not one of them. He replaced the glass bottles our neighbors left at their doors. When we went to the grocery store, they offered us a paper bag for the groceries. I don’t remember that we had the concept of a water bottle. At school we all drank water from the drinking fountain. I used to have a collapsible stainless steel cup for that. How and why did we move from other materials to single-use plastics? We would be better off if we have never invented them.
How things changed
I remember how everything began to change. The news reported that deforestation was a big issue and that our dependency on paper heavily contributed to it. Don’t get me wrong, deforestation really was (and is) a big issue. But my point is, they presented plastic as a better choice to paper. Little by little we were taught that plastic was a good thing. So, they begun introducing plastic bags at the grocery store. The milk was already coming in plastic packaging, but the milkman disappeared entirely. By the middle of the 80s, we begun seeing water bottles everywhere. Even the soda bottles were not made of glass anymore, it was all plastic now.
The impact of single-use plastics in the environment
Today, we know the havoc that single-use plastics are causing to the environment. They are especially harmful to the oceans and sea life. A video showed a sea turtle with a plastic straw in its nostrils. The painful process to extract it shocked the world. Seeing things like that, I would like to go back and un-invent it. Unfortunately, we can’t change the past, we need to educate ourselves and take better decisions for the future.
What we can do
What can we do, at a personal level, to at least mitigate the impact of single-use plastics in the environment? First off, we need to substitute them with long-term materials. Particularly, we can use reusable straws made of stainless steel. We can also opt for cloth grocery bags. It’s important to have personal water bottles in our backpack, ones that are not made of plastic. Hopefully with small steps like these we will make a positive impact for the future generations.
What about you? Do you take steps to reduce the use of single-use plastics in your life? What strategies do you follow? Leave that in the comments!