A Plastic Free February!

Plastic. If there was one material that could be chosen to represent mankind over the last 50 years plastic would almost certainly be it.

Once heralded as the solution to many problems of decades gone by, we now understand that our relentless use of plastic has presented us with a wealth of new problems to be solved in the modern day.

I love this little image, and it's message will be important to the experiment as you will see later.

Let's face it, in many ways plastic is pretty impressive. As a light material (in comparison to say glass) it helped to revolutionise packaging, lightening the load of many a plane, boat and lorry and thereby helping to reduce carbon emissions and transport costs. As a flexible and durable material it also helped to ensure that breakages and spillages of those same loads were also greatly reduced.
It's ability to repel water make it an ideal choice for a whole host of different applications from our clothing, to the bags we carry our food in and the laminating pouch that has kept many a paper sign dry over the years.
We love to package our food in plastic too. Sealed plastic handily keeps oxygen away from delicate food items, delaying the time they take to spoil, while the addition of other gases (such as nitrogen) into the same packaging is also designed to extend the shelf life of our fruit and veg.


However, despite the many selling points that plastic can offer, it is hard to ignore the damage to the environment caused by plastics. This, coupled with the disposable and single use culture that many parts of the world have become accustomed to, has led to an unfathomable amount of plastic discarded in every place you can imagine. From the tops of mountains, to remote woodlands, roadsides, rivers and beaches, there is no place that we can escape littered plastic.
As well as taking an extraordinary amount of time to break down (a plastic bottle can take anywhere from 450-1000 years to break down), plastic never truly decomposes - instead turning into incredibly small plastic particles that are invariably ingested by wildlife.

This great little video by the guys at TedEx documents some of the problems that plastic is causing in an easy to follow way. Give it a watch!

One thing that the video highlights is that the best case scenario for this plastic is to be recycled. But is this really the best we can do in the long term? After all, as the picture further up this blog suggests recycling should not be the first thing we tackle in solving this problem, as it only deals with plastic that already exists.
Surely the first thing we need to do is to reduce the amount of plastic that we use? Surely we do not need any more plastic in the world than there already is? It is from that idea that the concept of "Plastic Free February" was born.

For those of you who know me personally, you may well be aware that myself and my wife Vicky have taken on this mantle every February for the last 3 or 4 years now, though without ever really documenting or telling that many people how it went. Hence this time round, I though it a good idea to share the love and the knowledge. I don't want you to think that I am going to go all "preachy" any time I see somebody with a plastic bottle, but knowledge is power and even if people just begin to consider their plastic use a little more then we will all be winning.

Our challenge is to go the 28 days of February without buying any items of single use plastic. Sounds easy right...? Having done this for a few years now, I think the evidence over the next couple of weeks will prove otherwise.
Over the course of this experiment I would like to document a few things:

1) How many things that you don't expect have plastic "hidden" within them.
2) How does avoiding plastic affect the time required to procure all the things to live our daily life?
3) How does avoiding plastic affect the price of procuring those same items.
4) And finally, how realistic is it that we could continue this experiment "for good".

To make things clear, we are talking about single use plastics here. The things that have one job and are then immediately discarded - i.e. plastic bags, wrapping, bottles, cling film, polystyrene etc. Any long term items - i.e. mobile phones, TVs etc are not the target here.

So wish us luck (I think we are going to need it) and check in each week to see how the experiment progresses!