Tuesday, February 28th, 8:41 pm
According to the Cortland Reuse website neighboring Tompkins and Onondaga Counties are able to divert about 50% of their waste away from landfills.
I’m not sure what that means or how it is measured. Do more people compost? Or donate used goods like furniture and clothing? Or are they better at recycling? Regardless,
Cortland County only diverts about 10% of its waste from landfills.
So whatever it means, we have to divert about 41% more to surpass our neighbors.
But I think we could one up them even better. We could produce almost no waste.
Bea Johnson began on the Zero Waste road in part to save money. Her husband had decided to quit his lucrative corporate job and start a sustainability consulting company. So they were already in the mindset to be more environmental. But, let’s face it, there’s the talk and then there’s the walk.
I care about the environment too, but today I bought a tapioca pudding in a plastic clamshell container (which I knew was not recyclable). That container which went in the garbage about 20 minutes after I purchased it will be around for several thousand years. What if I hadn’t bought it? It cost around $3.00. That money could have gone into the bank. I would have avoided sugar and plastic induced guilt.
Bea Johnson ran across the term ‘zero waste’ in reference to industrial practices. She didn’t know what it meant in that context, but it inspired her to think about what it could mean in a household context. She says,
“We did not know whether we could eliminate every piece of trash, but striving for zero would provide a target to get as close to it as possible, to scrutinize our waste stream and address even the smallest items.”
When I scrutinize what goes into our garbage, sadly it is a lot of plastic. Mostly plastic food wrappers or containers; yogurt tubs, cheese and meat wrappers, plastic ziploc bags for premade tortillas, bottle caps…
According to the Toxic Free Food Campaign most glass bottled beverages still have caps containing PVC and orthophthalates which are linked to harm to reproductive health and neurological development in babies and young children.
And here I must digress again. The evangelical community has been a part of my life since I was a teenager. Among the things I learned from them was to embrace the concept of ‘pro-life’. This idea, to support life when it was threatened, became one of the most important principles that I wanted to live by.
But over the years it became clear to me that evangelicals as a group didn’t take being pro-life as seriously as I did. They did not seem to think black lives mattered, or the lives of brown people in other countries (or in our country), or the lives of muslims, or people in the LGBTQ community. They voted for more access to assault weapons, they supported torture and unlawful imprisonment, and winked at life threatening environmental disasters. The lives of children and unborn babies were also of little consequence, I was forced to realize, when so many evangelicals complained about and tried to block accessibility to health care for all, including prenatal care. And how many times have I heard evangelicals call for less government oversight. ‘Let big business do what it wants’. What big business wants is money, even if that means flooding the earth with toxic chemicals.
I think there must be evangelicals who do not think this way, but what I have just detailed are not things I pulled from anti-christian headlines, rather they are observations gleaned from conversations with my evangelical friends. Well, if they read this we will probably not be friends any longer. But if I know them they are unlikely to read a Zero Waste blog.
Ok. To get back to the main point, plastic is bad for babies and children. And this is what I really wanted to say,
if you really are pro-life you have to give up plastic.
This is what I have to say to myself the next time I want to buy food wearing a plastic outfit. Am I really pro-life? Then don’t buy plastic.
Tomorrow, hopefully a more detailed before picture of plastic.