LaurasTheory offers a few new tips to help reduce our over-use of petro-plastics at a fairly low cost:
1) My most recent favorite discovery: if a food storage scenario REQUIRES a bag instead of a bowl, pan or box, wrap the food in an unused (thus obviously still clean), bio-degradeable doggie bag. When you use the food, you can then repurpose the bag to the needs of doggie cleanup :). Biodegradeable doggie bags are commonly available at most pet stores, and online at reasonable cost.
2) Most moms already know that much money can be saved by packing children's lunches in re-usable food storage containers. This practice also is more eco-friendly (and cheaper) for food storage in general. Instead of buying box after box, year after year, of plastic bags for food storage, invest in a set of re-usable containers for primary use.
Though plastic is better for child-use for safety reasons, glass is the most preferable for home-use, since it doesn't absorb mold and only requires petro-plastics for the lids (and one day that will change, too).
3) Instead of using those small, plastic trash-basket liners, or re-using plastic grocery bags for the same, line the bottom of non-kitchen trash-baskets with a paper towel, made of post-consumer content (recycled paper, in other words), or simply with a newspaper or magazine page, if you still take newspapers and magazines.
Some of the above may seem expensive upfront when compared to disposable petro-plastic products you can buy everywhere, but they are a bargain when you consider long term re-usability, and the impact of over-use of disposable plastic products on all our gasoline prices.
Though electric cars are entering the marketplace, AT LAST, many years are going to pass before the transition off gasoline is complete.
The snail's pace of manufacturing and distribution of plant based (rather than petroleum based) household products into the general marketplace is very frustrating, and the ridiculous prices attached to some of the products, especially trash bags, (which should be 100% biodegrable by now) is, frankly, angering.
LaurasTheory's view is that the game can be forced by we the people, so to speak, by simply engaging in methodologies that limit our use of plastics, thus creating an impact on the market.
This strategy will, at the very least, help boost the renewable resources sector of the economy, while hopefully, at the same time, take us one step further towards ending the destructive practices that the past three decades of extremely anti-environment (thus anti-life) economic practices have wrought.
We may as well do what we can to discourage the petro industry from mis-using the little bit of petroleum left in the world while we wait for bio-plastics and sustainable vehicles to reach mass-market levels of production.
- by Laura M Mauney
