Kicking the Plastic Habit

Terry’s new book Plastic Free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and How You Can Too is pub­lished with­out plas­tic, all the way down to the glue. (If you’re going to shop for it online, check out her web­site first to learn about buy­ing from a place that has com­mit­ted to ship­ping it with­out plas­tic.) We talked with Terry recently about plastic-free liv­ing, why the pro­posed alter­na­tives to bisphe­nol A (BPA) might be worse, and the con­nec­tion between cut­ting out plas­tic and build­ing a local economy.

Q. Why did you write this book? Whom are you try­ing to reach?

A. While I was writ­ing, I was think­ing: What would have helped me when I didn’t know any­thing? I tried to make this a book for peo­ple who are just start­ing [to cut out plas­tic], or who are already on their way.

I’ve been work­ing on going plastic-free for five years. I did it slowly. I really rec­om­mend that peo­ple take it step by step, and then it won’t take so much time. Because a lot of the time and effort is just devel­op­ing a new habit. Once you have the habit, you don’t have to think about it. For exam­ple, I never leave the house with­out a reusable bag anymore—and I don’t have a car, so it’s not a mat­ter of leav­ing a bag in the car. It’s not hard, it was just learn­ing to remem­ber to do that in the beginning.

Q. Have you cal­cu­lated how much money you save with your new habits, like buy­ing food in bulk?

A. I went from eat­ing Stouffer’s mac-n-cheese in a microwav­able plas­tic tray to eat­ing food from the bulk bins, so it’s kind of hard for me to com­pare. But to me, now, what I put in my body is more impor­tant than hav­ing lots of stuff. So I’ve shifted my spending.

Q. Where are the places you’ve been most sur­prised to find plastic?

A. I still think that the most sur­pris­ing thing I ever dis­cov­ered is that chew­ing gum is made out of plas­tic. And that there’s plas­tic in a lot of pills—especially time-release pills and capsules.

So it’s the plas­tics that are meant to be ingested that sur­prise me. And you have to be care­ful. People say to me, “It’s okay because I chew Glee Gum, and Glee is made with nat­ural chi­cle.” And that’s true, it’s made from nat­ural chicle—mixed with plas­tic. I dis­cov­ered a plastic-free chew­ing gum this year that’s made by an English com­pany, Peppersmith.

Q. BPA gets a lot of atten­tion. What else should we be aware of, when it comes to human health?

A. There are thou­sands of addi­tives that could be added to any par­tic­u­lar plas­tic prod­uct; they affect the strength, flex­i­bil­ity, color, and even some­times add antimi­cro­bial and flame-retardant prop­er­ties. When you see the num­ber in the tri­an­gle at the bot­tom of a con­tainer, that tells you what the basic poly­mer is. Those basic plas­tic mol­e­cules are strung together, but the addi­tives aren’t really attached, and when the plas­tic is sub­jected to stress, like heat or light or age, those addi­tives can leach out. Plastics man­u­fac­tur­ers are not required to dis­close any of the ingre­di­ents in their for­mu­la­tions, so we don’t know what chem­i­cals have been added.

In one exper­i­ment in Canada some researchers were using plas­tic polypropy­lene test tubes—#5 plas­tic, which is con­sid­ered to be food-safe. Their exper­i­ment had noth­ing to do with plas­tic, they just hap­pened to be using plas­tic test tubes, and their results kept get­ting con­t­a­m­i­nated. What they found was that addi­tives in the tubes were leach­ing into the chem­i­cals they were actu­ally test­ing. They were shocked about this because they thought #5 plas­tic was nonreactive—everyone thought that. A lot of food con­tain­ers are made out of #5 plas­tic and the FDA labels them as food-safe.

The point is that if we don’t know what chem­i­cals have been added, there’s no way for us to know what could be leach­ing out and whether it’s safe or not.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Grist.org.