No plastic, please

Plastic bags consumed this year:


Grabbed from Reusablebags.com

When I was a kid growing up in East Van, groceries came in paper bags. We would fold them up, save them for art projects, or wrap other things with them. Sometimes our school books were wrapped in old Safeway bags when they weren't wrapped in Desperate Dan comic book pages brought back from Scotland by our Gran. Dad made some interesting turkey recipe that called for the bird to be placed in a paper bag. Greasy chips got drained on brown paper bags.

Grandpa worked at the Macmillan Bloedel lumber plant at the edge of the Fraser River. Every night, Grandpa would pack his lunch pail with a piece of fruit and a big sandwhich he made himself wrapped in waxed paper. The meat for the sandwhich was invariably purchased at Reid the Butcher's on Granville Mall. At Reid's we would scuff our feet through drifts of sawdust on the wide floor to the cold glass cabinets of pig's trotters, sausages and beef tongues lolling on ice which would scare us witless. Gran would order a cut of bacon or a pound of ground meat which the butchers would wrap in brown paper and twine that descended from spools hung from the ceiling. In her purse, she had a little zippered thing that expanded into a nylon bag like a leather toed stocking into which she put all her purchases.

My Oma(German for Grandma), after we'd laid waste to her Sunday dinner, would place side plates over bowls containing leftovers and stack them in the fridge.

I've sworn off plastic bags and plastic wrap in 2008. Don't need it.

But eliminating Plastic consumption in Japan is so hard because it is used for very nearly all packaging. Since the first day of the year, I've filled a whole plastic garbage bag with plastic. It's near impossible to get staples in string or paper packages. Rice in Japan comes in big plastic bags with zip closures, no string bags anymore. And most other dry things also come in plastic - granola, seaweed, noodles. Staple wet stuff is often in plastic - soy sauce, tofu, and kimchi is sold in unrecyclable plastic containers. You can't reuse a plastic kimchi container for anything but kimchi because it's so pungent.

The only things I am sure are recycled are plastic PET bottles, glass, styro meat trays, steel and aluminum,rags and glossy and plain paper.

I'm essentially forced to buy something I don't want and can't dispose of ethically.

Comments

[Amy]

Good for you for swearing off plastic bags and wrap! I know how hard it can be here to avoid plastics, but there are a few things you can do.

Rice does still come in paper bags, you just have to look around a bit. Many neighborhoods still have an okome-ya (rice specialty shop), where the rice is polished and packaged to order. Most should either have reusable paper bags on offer or be happy to use a bag you provide. Larger supermarkets also sometimes have a do-it-yourself rice polisher and the available brown rice will come in a resealable paper or plastic bag (although you won't be able to reuse the bag for more supermarket rice).

As for wet staples, most soy sauce and other seasoning bottles are made of PET so are fully recyclable. And I've never tried it, but a local tofu shop should be happy to use a container you provide.

If you do end up being stuck with plastic bags, remember that they come in handy for wrapping garbage and keeping pests at bay, especially in the summer when unwrapped kitchen scraps start to stink within hours.

And if all else fails you might be relieved to know that the incinerators now used in Japan burn garbage at a high enough temperature that plastics are supposed to burn cleanly (dioxin leaches out only when burned at low temperatures or in a poorly maintained incinerator).

Hope that helps a bit, and good luck!

[erizabesu]

Thanks Amy for the tip about rice bags.

The resealable rice bags that I do have get repurposed holding veggies in the fridge. I try to get the most use out of them I can.

I read about Tokyo burning plastics at high temp. The worry is the particulate, not necesarily the gases, that are released with burning plastic. I'll do more research!

[billywest]

I bought a bag of cashew nuts at The Daiso last year and couldn't believe what I found upon opening it: each nut was individually wrapped in plastic. I can still hear Jeff Goldblum's line in Independence Day when he finds an aluminum can in the regular garbage basket while wandering the halls during an impending alien-invasion crisis, "My God in heaven!"

[erizabesu]

My sympathies are with Jeff Goldblum - see
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fd20071007pb.html

[Tony Notarianni]

Hi Liz,
Here in the USA more and more people are talking about the evil of plastic. People are shocked to find out about the small island of Midway, so far from anywhere being an environmental disaster of waste plastic from the ocean.

Some stores now sell re-usable bags, we have one of woven re-cycled cloth at home, but there are hurdles. For example I heard today that plastic bag companies are threatening to sue local governments who are trying to get people off plastic with outright bans. Too simplistic in an already teetering economy perhaps! Anyway my only issue is that I still need to dispose of my garbage in plastic bags, so whatever plastic bags I do end up with are usually used for this purpose. However, surely there must be a better way? How do you dispose of trash? On the subject, I am pretty happy to see each week how little I have in regular trash these days, the other collection bin of plastic, glass and metal is always heavier. :-)