There is a floating island of plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean the size of Texas. The plastic bag you get from the grocery store will be around longer than your grandchildren. Attempts to create bio-plastic from corn that will degrade more rapidly and eliminate the use of petro-products are not making progress, in part because they cost more and are not as durable- sort of the point I guess. The hope is that product packaging will incorporate these bio-degradable materials because that excessive packing goes directly into landfills without reuse. This won’t happen unless consumers demand the change because of cost.

I am very uncomfortable buying anything made of or packaged in plastic products. The only exceptions might be very high quality items, preferably made of recycled materials, that I am reasonably sure will still be desirable and functional for the foreseeable future. One of the changes I’ve made in the last year is to examine my purchases from a long term perspective. Do I really need this? Can I find an alternative that has less packaging? Can I find it used? Are there versions that are not indestructible?

Perhaps the worst offenders are food products packaged in plastic containers. Metal cans and glass bottles are totally recyclable yet more and more food products are being packed in plastic, much of which is not recycled. The solution to this is fairly easy: Buy canned or bottled products when you really need something ready made. Learn to cook and use fresh ingredients that don’t need packaging. In my local grocery I can get meat packed in aseptic plastic packaging or meat wrapped in paper by the butcher, not a hard choice. The aseptically packaged food may last much longer but the packaging itself trumps that- it will around for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

We should think about what our grandchildren will wonder about when they think about the choices we made. What were we thinking when we wasted precious resources to make plastic bags, bubble packaging, dollar store tschotkes, etc, etc.? Why did we leave these mountainous piles of plastic outside of every city and town? How dumb was that?

It doesn’t mean that just because we may not be around to answer those questions that we don’t have to. We have to ask ourselves, every time we buy something: ‘what is the long term effect of this choice?’. And we have to justify to ourselves the same way we would if our children were demanding the same answers from us.