More & more or less is more?
My dad is the most active person at home and happens to be ever-ready to get weekly groceries. However, he prefers going to local farm markets over supermarkets. He innately believes that the produce is fresh and feels a connection to those farmers who work so hard to provide us with food. So, every Sunday he takes up his two jhute bags big enough to hold upto two weeks groceries. The moment he comes back home, My mom begins sorting out the veggies. The more she segregates the veggies, the more she anticipates their use and storage. As in, the vegetables that needs to be used in 3–4 days will be outside waiting to be cooked while the others go to the refrigerator.
To my surprise, I never found any plastic bags or any unnecessary packaging at my parents home except for the jhute bags that has been cleaned and kept ready for the next 2 weeks. My parents have managed to do this pretty well since the invasion of the plastics. However, Plastic dominated the retail sector.
As urban curators, the retail centres always have this urge to marketise products so that people can buy them in excess. Plastic sneaked in such centres in every way possible by vouching to make their lives easy . World producers of plastic made it look like an easily available resource for an efficient storage. It became so cheap and reliable that it joined the ‘throwaway culture’.
While these actions lasted a lifetime , the consequences were predominant elsewhere. Local landfills were being filled with all sorts of plastic joining other types of waste. So in response to this, municipal processing facilities have been started to process the local waste.
Sydney, the city where I currently live in is tackling with the same problem. They tried to recycle of anything that has value in the waste stream. What remained was a consistent stream of plastic bags making them into a pile the size of a huge building. Keeping up with this river of waste seems to be a herculean task and recycling it might not do any justice either.
We as humans have created this problem and we are trying to remediate through alternative solutions but the problem of plastic waste seems to be bigger and prevention seems to be the only solution, therefore there is a need of shift in our ways of thinking and treat the waste at source i.e. starting from us.
Even though my parents have been a great example for me, I have been a victim of this plastic addiction. However, I do care about the environment. Living in an urban space, these environmental problems had a profound impact on my understanding of plastic addiction and made me re-think my everyday practices of using plastic. I told myself to be plastic free for a month and the results were astonishing. It was hard in the beginning because I couldn’t take cloth bags everywhere I go, however I started planning properly. whenever I go shopping for groceries I take two big cloth bags for two weeks and small bags as compartments for vegetables and fruits. I guess I ultimately followed my parents footsteps. While doing so, I even noticed that few retailers are starting to understand the problem of waste and even trying to reflect in their business. However there are few who don’t realize it enough. For example: Coles have a scoop & weigh section for dried nuts and snacks. Why would you need a plastic bag for every small purchase of these nuts. Why can’t they have compostable bags in every section because we all know by now that plastic recycling is a myth.
Retailers change their approach based on consumer demand at the end of the day. If all of us can commit to purchasing plastic-free products, and waste is in our everyday discussion, then retailers do take note. We might even influence the government to make a policy to ban the single-use plastic in our city.
Set yourself the challenge to remove all single-use plastic for a month, and see what you can learn for the starters.
