Bag it: Is Your Life Too Plastic?

Have you ever stopped to think about how much plastic you are using in a day? Or where it goes when you are done? Or what recycling really means? I hadn't either until I watched the documentary Bag It: Is Your Life Too Plastic?

Would you like to know my first reaction? Well I literally felt like I had been punched in the gut. I felt so disgusted at the way I had been looking at plastic and how easy it had been for me to dispose of it without thinking of the consequences.

Let me preface this by saying that I try to be a good person. I am a vegan whenever possible. I don't ever eat meat. I buy organic body products and use natural laundry detergent. I air dry my clothes and read books on the environment etc etc (you get the picture). But not once in my quest had I ever thought about my plastic consumption. And to be honest as much as I hate myself for it, I didn't really  know.

The industry has done a great job of selling plastic and leaving the consumer unaware of what is really going on. In my head I thought since I recycled I was fine, but that just isn't the case and not only is plastic is in  absolutely EVERYTHING, it is harming our environment and killing species.

So you might be saying to yourself well so what, it's not so bad we can just keep making more. But that is the problem. We can't. Plastic is a non renewable resource and if we don't start making changes soon we are going to have some serious problems in the future.

I think it really hit me when I ACTUALLY thought about how much plastic I use in just a day. If you really think about it you will realize that it is absolutely insane. Here let me give you an example of part of my daily high school routine (back in the day when I wasn't vegan and didn't know anything about the environment).

545: Wake up and pack a lunch. What did this entail?
1) I would get my bread to make my sandwich! Which came out of plastic wrapping. So there is that.
2) I would put my meat on it which of course I had taken out of plastic wrapping. (Oh dear!)
3) All of that would go into a plastic Ziploc bag.
4) I would then cut up some strawberries which surprise surprise I had gotten out of a plastic container, which also went into a Ziploc bag and so on and so forth.

By the end of it I had taken every item out of some sort of plastic encasing and then put them back into another one. Once I had done that I would pack all of those Ziploc bags into a plastic grocery bag to take to school where I would promptly throw it away after eating my food. YIKES!

This folks was just my preparation for lunch, I didn't even factor in the plastic forks and knives I used at school, the plastic bottle my diet coke came in and the plastic liners that coated our trashcans that held the plastic bags I threw away. That is mind boggling right? And it isn't even a full days worth.

I won't spoil the movie and give away tons of facts but I will say that it opened my eyes to a lot of the ways in which we use plastic, and once at that. A ton of energy and fossil fuels go into making that plastic and for me to use it once just isn't good enough. It doesn't add up, and so my challenge for myself and you is to cut down on plastic for good!

The documentary was great and I encourage everyone to watch it! Together we really can conquer our plastic addiction!

Namaste,
Lisette