Tackling the Question of Plastic

An assessment of the many things we buy that are packaged in plastic is eye-opening. Food, personal care items, cleaning stuff - a lot of it comes to us from the store wrapped, encased and stored in plastic. A look around the bathroom reveals liquid soaps, shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, bathroom cleaners, toothpaste - and that does not include things like toothbrushes and razors, which are disposable in whole or in part. In the kitchen, food containers, dish detergent bottles, various storage containers, laundry soap container - all plastic. The medicine cabinet is full of plastic bottles and tubes. And of course many of the things we use are made of plastic too. So the first thing to do is to make some decisions about what it is sensible for us to try and change, and what we will live with - at least for now, unless and until we learn of other solutions.

Reuse and recycle - two of the words that are supposed to help us reduce garbage, and a good place to start from here. The reuse of plastic containers is limited by the space available to store those reused containers in, and that is particularly true on the boat where space and efficient storage are always the prime consideration. And by their usefulness for the purpose contemplated. There is a good side to this: on board plastic can keep goods normally stored in paper or cardboard dry and free of creatures or mould. Bulk goods packed in smaller containers may stay fresh longer, since I can bring out small portions at a time and the whole won’t be exposed every time a container is opened. And repackaging reduces the chance of finding that unexpected hitchhikers have arrived with the cardboard you brought aboard - like cockroaches, a pet hate of ours.

Recycling is easier is some places than others, and there are places where it is not available at all. Even where it is available it is often limited to only some types of plastics; and sometimes those plastics travel a long way to get to the facilities where they are broken down to be reused, which means that they use even more resources. So recycling is an option only some of the time and with only some plastic containers. At this point recycling is only a partial solution.

Any plastic that is not reused or recycled is going to end up in the garbage, wherever we go. And from wherever we leave it it may make its way to a garbage dump or into the water and to the sea, where it will continue to drift around until it ends up in the belly of some sea-creature or part of the plastic island in the Pacific. (See information on the plastic garbage island) We really hate to contribute to that.

At this point the best option seems to be to cut down as much as possible on buying goods and groceries packaged in plastic. In some cases, this means changing what we buy - bar soaps instead of liquid soap and shampoo, powdered detergent (phosphate free, of course) instead of liquid, and bar soap for hand washing clothes. Which means doing some research on different kinds of soaps and what they are best used for. In other cases, buying concentrated forms of products like cleaning liquids would help reduce the number of containers which are incidentally purchased along with them. In some cases making our own things is a help - making our own yogurt, for instance. And finding the things we need packaged in different ways may be an option too. The thought of doing some of our own canning is one we can explore, but the use of fuel and our need to purchase some of the equipment would make it an expensive endeavour.

Time to make a start - might as well start with learning more about soaps.

Setting Out, Toward A Smaller Boatprint

When you travel and live, as we now do, on oceans and along coast lines, you see things that were not part of the expectations, the dreams that set you on this path. I remember leaving Miami once and passing garbage and cast offs as we sailed away - plastic bottles, balloons, bits of wood, even a chest of drawers floating along. Far out on the ocean we have passed chunks of styrofoam, plastic crates, all kinds of plastic packaging, more balloons, more bottles, as well as the lost fishing and mooring buoys that weather or circumstance have torn away from where they were intended to be. We have seen plastic bags floating under the surface close to beaches, even lying on the bottom as we snorkel near the boat. Add to that the garbage which will deteriorate more quickly, the wood and the bits of food and fabric and rope that appear from time to time (and some of that plastic), the glass that washes up on some beaches, and it seems that wherever we human beings go we leave our trails of garbage behind. And since there are a lot of us, that makes a lot of garbage. And then there is all the garbage that lies mostly invisible in and under the water - from chemical waste to human waste to the remains of things we have constructed of materials whose permanence has outlasted their usefulness. And all the remains of all the fuels we burn, exhausting into the air and water...

Pausing in Dartmouth has give us time to reflect on a lot of this. And living with the multitude of kinds of packaging that come with each thing we buy, and the ongoing discussions about reducing/reusing/recycling that are now part of life in North America has helped focus our thoughts. As well as the news about the Bisphenol-A debate and the possible implications for our health of using our Nalgene water bottles. At the same time we have been reflecting on the price of using fossil fuels - both financially and to the environment - and exploring the use of electric motors and ways to improve our collection of electrical energy from wind and sun. At this point in our lives we are ready to do more to reduce our boatprint on the environment.

As I sorted the plastics, those that could be recycled and those that could not, I started to think about how to reduce the amount of plastic passing through our lives. A look through the things we buy revealed how much is packaged and contained in one kind of plastic or another. And of course we do live in what is, essentially, a plastic boat, constructed using a combination of petrochemicals. And use tools constructed of plastics. To live completely rid of plastics would be impractical. But there have to be practical ways to reduce the packaging we acquire, a way to replace at least some of what we use now with products less packaged, or not packaged in plastic at all. And we thought about the fact that even when plastic is recycled (not possible everywhere we visit) that recycling still uses some of our world’s precious supply of energy. And the less we use the less we contribute to that supply of almost indestructible garbage, wherever it ends up. Figuring out what we will do, and doing it, will be a good place to start.

So over the next little while we will be evaluating what we do now and what we hope to do while thinking about how to reduce the impact of our life on the environment around us, exploring what is possible and what is practical. We’ll keep a chronicle of our adventures, our ideas and actions and how things progress, on this blog. And talk a little bit about groups and people we meet along the way whose work is related to what we are trying to do. We hope you’ll join us in our explorations from time to time, and will be happy to hear any helpful suggestions and ideas you have. Next blog we’ll start tackling getting some of the plastic out of our lives...