My Consumer Diet

99 Cent/Andreas Gursky

At this point in reforming my shopping habits to make them more sustainable my main focus has been weeding out plastics. Here are a few strategies that have helped me along the way:

1. Produce is your friend and better than alternatives. Fresh produce requires no packaging. You may irritate the cashier or those waiting in line behind you as your loose oranges go rolling off the counter - I have - but that can easily be corrected for with a reusable bag. Furthermore, by committing to creating less waste your diet will likely grow more skewed toward fresh fruits and vegetables, which is hardly an undesirable side effect.

While you may be leaving the grocery store with less plastic and packaging, the question remains, however, whether those moves are good for the environment overall, especially if those oranges had to be shipped and preserved cross-country in order to reach your local vendor. To take it a step further and reduce energy demands and pollution stemming from food distribution you could start spending some more time at your local farmers market.

By purchasing from local farmers you can typically guard against the risk that your fresh produce polluted the environment more than the plastic-sealed variant would have. They are also one of the few places I know of that can offer dairy products that do not come in disposable plastic containers. This form of shopping moreover comes with the added benefits of supporting local businesses and developing a relationship with the entrepreneurs behind them, as elaborated upon in Colin Beavan's No Impact Man.

If you are interested in finding local resources for shopping sustainably, Sustainable Table's Shopping Guides are the best resource I have found so far. Although I have yet to decipher what rubric the site uses, if any, in deciding whether to include a business on it, each individual vendor provides specific information on the nature of their operations for you to decide for yourself whether they deserve your business. The site also provides links to online venues for identifying sustainable non-food products.

It is also worth noting that eating locally will only be an issue as long as our current energy economy does not fundamentally change. Once we make the transition to clean, renewable energy sources, the ecological impact of transportation and refrigeration will be a negligible issue and one of the few barriers to using it for the purposes of distributing food will hinge on whether those resources could be used more effectively elsewhere in improving the quality of our lives. In the meantime, choosing to consume locally will put pressure on transportation, refrigeration, and related services to utilize alternative energy sources and help make that possible future a reality.

2. If you can't get it fresh, get it canned. Or bottled. Just be sure the brand you settle on does not line its cans with plastic, as many unfortunately do. The beauty of cans and bottles is that they can be cans and bottles again. A plastic bottle almost never becomes a plastic bottle again.

3. Pasta boxes. Its ingredients may not be sourced locally, but pasta does come in paper boxers, which often contain recycled content and can then either be further recycled or thrown into a compost bin. Of course, substituting all our plastic with paper would not be much more commendable, so you also may resign yourself to purchasing grains from bulk bins with your own reusable bags.

4. Eggs. Somewhere I saw a graphic illustrating the general trend that the smaller the animal you consume, the smaller your carbon footprint (and those who consume no animals have got us all beat), which leads me to believe that eggs have even less impact. In my parts they come in recycled paper cartons, making the purchase that much more justifiable over the styrofoam and plastic-wrapped chicken further down the aisle. If you cannot give meat up or need the protein, you can usually get it paper-wrapped from a local butcher.

5. Baking soda. Is there anything this stuff can't clean? I am already using it in place of toothpaste and deodorant, with no adverse effects, mind you! Next is to test it as a shampoo, since it can apparently be used for that too.

It has been easy so far. I cannot say that I have felt particularly deprived at any point, but my feelings may change the longer I carry this on and the more I need to replenish diminishing stocks of other consumer goods, such as pens, my toothbrush and floss.

Luckily I am not pioneering this change in lifestyle. My Plastic-free Life is a blog documenting the author's own experience in this ordeal, one she has engaged herself in since 2007. I expect there is excellent guidance to be had there.

More on plastics in society and ecology

Here is some more information on the ecological nature of plastic from the perspective of artist and activist Dianna Cohen, who has also founded the Plastic Pollution Coalition, an organization committed to displacing disposable plastic products in our economy.

One of their initiatives is "Ban the Bag" or municipally banning plastic bags. So far Maui, San Francisco and San Jose among others have done so, with other cities, including New York, considering similar legislation.

Cohen's talk on this subject comes from TED, a resource I will be bound to pull more material from in the future.



I have been conducting my own investigation into the actual chemical dynamics of different plastics and their interaction with biology, but the information is not as readily available as I had expected it to be. So far I have come across biodegradable plastics and have read that even more conventional plastics degrade within a year at sea, but that does not seem to be a guarantee that they have no negative impact on the health of humans or other organisms.

Cohen states that "plastic . . . is always still plastic" in her talk and for all sense and purposes that may be considered the case. While plastic polymers can break back down into their constituent monomers, the speed and scale at which this occurs under typical conditions may be insignificant as polymers can wreak havoc on biological pathways in the meantime, which in turn might prolong such decomposition from taking place.

Even in the event that a plastic does revert to its monomers, that by no means renders it any safer, not least because associated chemicals that would leech into the environment as a result are known to be toxic, such as the now infamous Bisphenol A. The monomers the make up commercial plastics are organic molecules, but so is benzene, a structurally related compound and a well-known carcinogen.

Everything comes at a cost and we must be practical, but is this our best option? Is pumping poison into our surroundings a reasonable price to pay to conveniently carry our groceries home or eat out on a whim?

Approaching Zero Waste

A great deal of my current waste-reduction efforts has been inspired by No Impact Man, an experiment in reducing one's ecological footprint to zero or even positive effects conducted by Colin Beavan that has spawned a book and documentary. Producing no trash was the first of five steps on his path to having no net ecological impact. The other four were:

No carbon-producing transportation
Sustainable eating
Sustainable consumption
No carbon-producing energy

As for me I have already made a lot of progress in eliminating trash-producing decisions and have almost completely avoided the garbage can for about a month now. A few habits and resources have helped me along the way.

1. Make your trash can inaccessible. Early on I found that out of force of habit I was throwing peels and otherwise recyclable materials into the trash without even noticing it. I could not lock my trash can up entirely because my roommates still use it, but I did make it a point to put it out of reach each time I was cooking, which was the activity responsible for most of my waste.

2. Cut plastic out of your diet. Since I cannot be sure that the plastic I consume will be recycled, downcycled or discarded by materials recovery and recycling facilities, I generally refuse to buy it. This will become a problem when my pens run out - maybe I will just use pencils - but for the time being I am avoiding anything that comes in plastic packaging. That means no bagged vegetables or bread, no boxed cookies or crackers, no condiments or toiletries unless they come in glass, paper or metal containers.

3. Biodegradability. Let nature recycle for you. There is much less work on our end if we simply buy what can rot. Humanity has had this incredibly efficient waste disposal system available to it throughout our entire history, doing us a favor and saving us labor. It is a wonder why we started to break from it at all. By invoking biodegradable pathways you can ensure that nutrients and other resources get returned to the earth for use by other forms of life and future generations.

4. Worms. So maybe a heap of stinking vegetable bits in your backyard is less than desirable. That is certainly the case in my city where any set up of that sort would attract RATS. Luckily my roommate took the initiative and bought us worms for our own in-house worm bin. A little weird I know but it provides a convenient way for us to dispose of our organic trash and so far it has not led to any odors or bugs to complain about.

There is one major difference between my strategy and that of No Impact Man. I am not counting recyclables as waste. Beavan argues that the recycling industry uses energy and other resources that we need for other causes, but I am focusing more on preventing the contamination of the ecology with harmful waste products and consider employing resources in recycling preferable to many other industries. If it can be reintegrated into the production process and in one way or another come to constitute the same form it originally had I am willing to buy it. That is why I find the purchase and recycling of glass, paper and metal acceptable. Plastics, on the other hand, are more complicated and not truly recyclable in many cases, which is why I advocate forgoing them.

Making the decision to eliminate garbage from your lifestyle certainly demands more planning and selectivity than conventional consuming does, but it is not without its advantages. If the knowledge that you are making an effort to lead a more sustainable lifestyle is not enough, I would advise keeping in mind an important point that Beavan makes in his book. If we treat the moments of our daily lives as hassles and obstacles that need to make way for the next ones, then what are we living for?

The Persistence of Garbage

Giant Gingko/Flickr

This is what I find to be a beautiful short film that gives some perspective and pause for thought on a phenomenon we are already fully aware of: many of the materials we use to produce goods last long beyond the useful lives of those goods:



Whether made of plastic or another substance, if our trash cannot decompose or otherwise degrade it stands to adversely impact not only the natural ecology, but also the quality of our lives. In the absence of a natural pathway for breaking down our trash into a more innocuous form or state, the possibility remains that we could accomplish it through the use of artificial or industrial means: recycling or engineering closed input-output loops into the production process.

But as we are aware of from our daily lives, even if we do not always think about it, the lugubrious reality is that the means for fully processing our waste do not exist and much of it slips through the cracks of our waste management system. It then escapes into and contaminates the environment, both human and natural.

This process is already playing out in the now well-publicized Pacific Garbage Patch and elsewhere. The problem is that plastic and other persistent rubbish cannot be converted into matter that can be usefully employed by organisms, existing natural cycles or by industry.

What is worse, what remains of our waste impairs life. At the macroscopic level this has taken the form of chicks dying after their parents feed them garbage, mistaking it for food. As far as plastic goes, once broken down into its basic molecules it interferes with biological pathways. Since plastic is photodegradable - broken down by light - this process inevitably occurs wherever plastic is exposed to light.

Plastics and other industrial chemicals have entered the human food web and trace amounts of them are already present in our bodies. In light of these developments it becomes clear to me that one of the major tasks before us on the path to sustainability will involve eliminating persistent waste. This will have to be accomplished either by taking advantage of natural processes to capture and recycle our wastes or by establishing synthetic means to do so.

Since I am not an engineer and in any event hold little top-down sway over the planning of manufacturers' production systems, the most salient way I can have an impact on the push to create no impact is, paradoxically enough, as a consumer. I may not be able to dictate what ingredients go into producing one product or service or another, how the outputs of those processes are disposed of, or how much it costs, but I can lend my support to businesses that incorporate sustainable practices. The rationale behind this approach is that if a critical proportion of consumers begins exhibiting such behavior, companies will respond accordingly, having been pitted against one another by the market in a race to do greener business. Once this process is well under way the system will transform itself from the inside out and we might already be witnessing the beginnings of this.

It is easy to criticize this approach, and even easier to criticize it without offering an alternative solution. One objection I expect is to the idea that people would be willing to engage in sustainable purchasing. It is seemingly irrational for someone to pay the higher costs traditionally associated with pursuing a more sustainable lifestyle. However, people engage in seemingly irrational economic behavior on a regular basis. They are willing to pay a premium on a product no materially different from a competing one for such things as a sense of status, aesthetics or other criteria.

Informed consumerism could similarly be motivated by such considerations. What is more, the premium on more sustainable alternatives in part translates into not just these abstract benefits but also material ones, such as cleaner water. If this were not a sufficient incentive it would be mainly because deterioration in environmental quality results from a tragedy of the commons and might warrant greater measures.

The difficulty is that it is not easy to determine what the sustainable alternatives are. You can attribute this to political spin, marketing and greenwashing, cryptic standards or more generally limits on individual knowledge and time. In my effort to find out to what extent the production of plastic could be made more sustainable, I discovered that some plastics are already biodegradable. One would think that this information would be pertinent enough to warrant the implementation of a clear standard and labeling systems for such plastics, but finding out which were was riddled with as much complexity as anyone who has looked into the recycling process for plastics has encountered.

My solution for this and similar issues is to overshoot. Instead of letting the complexity of these issues justify inaction, I have opted for the simple solution of cutting out of my consumer basket products incorporating anything other than those substances I know can be metabolized by ecology or industry. What that really means is that I am now refraining from buying any disposable or nondurable products unless they are biodegradable or fully recyclable - i.e. capable of reconstituting what they originally were - as glass and metal are.

The philosophy behind this is that if something consisting of essentially immortal materials will not be used in one way or another indefinitely, people should not buy it. As such, I have not completely ruled out laptops or other durable goods made from plastic. First, they last, and second, services exist for channeling their components back into production after the useful lives of the products themselves have ended. The reason such services exist is because there is money to be had in them and that will grow increasingly the case as people choose to make more sustainable purchases over those that promote persistent waste.