Is a disposable life style a road to a sustainable future?
We Americans live lives of convenience. We repeatedly use whatever discard whenever and get a new anything in normal course. Drive through lifestyles, food truck gourmets, use and toss. But where does it go? Is a disposable life style a road to a sustainable future?
Natural products, those that come from the earth can return to it. Paper, wood, cotton all decompose, ready to be mulch for the next generation, ready to recompose and grow again. Glass and metal can be economically recycled and reused, as it was in the past.
On the other hand plastic, while replacing natural fibers, does not mulch, will not return to the earth but instead has overwhelmed the ocean and the life within it. It is said by 2026 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. The Great Barrier Reef is dead. This bodes ill for life on earth, without the ocean we all die.
Another unsung plastic threat is our clothing. All that lint in the dryer from cotton clothes is being replaced by micro fibers of plastic. Once again to note, plastic does not decompose those microfibers are forever being washed into our streams, lakes, rivers and eventually the ocean creating a micro fiber haze in the waters surrounding us. The smaller the plastic the more insidious the threat, the more immediate the response is needed.
Plastic, an arm of oil production, is a multi-billion dollar industry and will not curtail its own use. Money being imaginary doesn’t care about the future, while humans being biologic, better outsmart both the monetary and the chemical systems that now hold our lives in jeopardy.
The kids are right; help isn’t coming. We must save ourselves. Question plastic use; straws, single use or when asked, “paper or plastic?” choose paper or better yet carry your own bags, utensils and straws. Stop being disposable! We can do it; speak up, speak out, change our shopping habits and change the world.
Thank you, Lynne from Our Revolution-Talent