This post is written for the “Save the Ocean” group-writing project by David, an enthusiastic Tai Chi Chuan practitioner and teacher who wanted to do something to spread awareness not only on a direct level about environment and energy, but also to help people find more satisfaction in life, whether having all kinds of resources and wealth, or living a simple life.

The Problem
Until very recently, plastic has been seen by most people as a modern miracle with few if any drawbacks. More and more items that were previously made of metal, wood, glass, and even natural fiber, have started to be made entirely or in significant part from plastics. Plastic drinking cups cost less than paper cups of the same size, plastic bottles allow people to see the contents of the bottle clearly, medical supplies can be made sterile and to the exact dimensions desired on a mass-production scale, and so on. The great majority of cardboard 1/2 gallon milk containers have plastic spouts, which makes it harder to recycle the container. Convenience, and not a weighing of total benefits vs deficits, has been the god and guide of manufacturing for the last 100 years.

However, the dark side of plastics has turned out to be not only the toxicity of the chemicals used in manufacturing them and that returns into our food chain, but ultimately the fact that plastics have no natural enemy. There are no bacteria that eat any of the plastics in common use. Instead, over many years they slowly break down under sunlight and moisture into toxic components while leaving the main plastic item untouched for thousands of years. The toxic chemicals released during breakdown enter into the food chain, and they end up contaminating our human life with known and unknown harmful consequences. There are currently epidemics in a large number of auto-immune and nervous system diseases, and these can not be accounted for just by increased reporting of the illnesses. The epidemics include multiple sclerosis, type I and type II diabetes (and type I diabetes is caused by genetic and environmental factors not by diet and exercise as type II is), multiple sclerosis, asthma, and autism. Doctors and other investigators are not sure if these are a result of badly made or wrongly applied childhood immunizations, chemicals in the environment such as food, water and air, or other causes.

One last and important result of plastic use worldwide has been filling of landfills, meaning increased garbage sprawl and higher costs for disposal, and also accumulation of plastic waste in our oceans, leading to strangling and choking of sea life (fish, mammals, and birds) as well as further emitting of toxins into the oceans. There is one patch of accumulated plastic waste in the southern Pacific Ocean that is twice the size of Texas, USA. In other words, a large plastic “desert”.

Answers
Fortunately, despite the serious problems described above, there are good solutions to begin unraveling the net in which we have trapped ourselves. You can read a thread of articles and news relating to plastics, the problems and some of the solutions.

One set of solutions involves change in individual patterns of use. I very rarely accept plastic shopping bags (maybe two or three times a year), and that only when there is absolutely now way to avoid it in order to carry a large number of items a large distance. That situation is normally one that involves my children, I must say… but they are pretty good about environment and they hate to use plastic shopping bags. Usually we carry our own re-usable bags, and that is certainly a terrific solution to the store plastic bag dilemma. I recently wrote about my single-handed fight with the plastic-bag industry.

Another fact my sons have learned is that water and beverage bottles are a great drain on natural water resources in some underprivileged foreign countries (such as Fiji, whose own residents often can not get safe drinking water while their water is being exported by giant companies using plastic bottles). There is no reason to drink bottled water in the United States, due to the purity of our tap water. I have found that every restaurant will give plain water in a glass, and at home we have a filter under the sink due to the fact that our water pipes are lead-based, and to remove chlorine which is an irritant.

Another set of solutions for the plastic dilemma will depend on the marketplace or government, or both. For example, I was in San Francisco recently and they are now banning stores from giving out plastic bags. This is already law there for the larger stores such as supermarkets. Unfortunately the supermarkets use paper bags instead, while it would be better to allow paper but to build in incentives for people to bring bags from home, as they do all over Europe. While in San Francisco on vacation, I found that any time there were leftovers in a restaurant meal, the take-home package was plain (coated) cardboard, very compostable. Smaller stores gave out only paper drinking cups, but were still able to use plastic bags until further phases of the law in San Francisco get phased in. New York City, my home town, is debating similar provisions. They should all end up with prohibition of use of commercial plastic bags, cups, plates, etc. Government needs to think this through from a garbage disposal viewpoint (inconvenience of managing large amounts of waste), a cost viewpoint, AND an environmental viewpoint on a world-scale.

One final opportunity and a trend that I want to let people know about: you can now get tableware, garbage bags, and some other key materials, in totally compostable bio-”plastic”. I use quotes around the word “plastic” because these items are made of totally natural materials (such as corn or potato). The term compostable has some international standards, and requires natural breakdown (by bacteria or other natural agents) of a material, rapid breakdown within 90 days, and leaving of no toxics behind. These are excellent standards! I recently bought my first set of compostable kitchen garbage bags. I paid twice the going rate for garbage bags, but since my order I found a much less costly source. You should know that the terms “biodegradable” indicates a far less desirable situation, since more time may be required for breakdown, and the by-products could be toxic or simply very small or invisible but still toxic bits of plastic. So look for “compostable” not “biodegradable”.

For all your forks, knives, plates, and similar formerly-plastic items, I recommend http://www.worldcentric.org as a source (there may be others even better, please let me know if you find them!). You can also find out more about various types of bio-plastics, such as at NatureWorks. There are also Q&A dialogues on the Internet on a variety of alternatives to plastic materials.

So the answers include refusing plastic items whenever possible, using substitute materials such as paper or bio-plastic when necessary, and consuming fewer tightly-wrapped-in-plastic supermarket items, convenience foods, and so on. The answers also include getting government to support reforms in packaging standards, including some changes mandated by laws, and other changes encouraged by shifting the pattern of oil-centric and plastics-industry-centric incentives that this country uses.

If we begin a rolling back to a simpler, less-toxic time in history, when gifts were were made of simpler materials, when packaging was natural, when products were built for beauty as well as durability, not just for minimal cost, and when we lived closer to our real needs, we may all find more satisfaction in daily life. Deep inside, we do know when we are trashing our own environment. There is an alternative, and that is the self-directed protecting of our environment.

January 2008 is “Save the Ocean” month here at The Giving Hands. Click here for more information on how you too, can save our oceans, and remember to subscribe to The Giving Hands for your daily updates!