Settling In

We are adjusting to life in Fort St John, where we have had to learn all over again where we can get various products. We can get a wide variety of bulk items at PriceSmart, including powdered milks and cheeses and even, if we were so inclined, cookie dough mix. We can get spices and candies and pastas and probably over a hundred other things from this fantastic bulk section.

Thank goodness also for Safeway. We've been buying our meat from behind the meat counter, and they fill our own containers with the things we want. Sensitive to our project stipulations and goals, they let us know when something comes prepackaged only, versus when they cut the meat themselves.  We also get buns (and sometimes donuts!) from their bakery, where we can pick out any number of buns and put them in the paper bags provided. These paper bags serve double for us in that they later become our garbage bags.

Speaking of garbage, most of our garbage currently is kitchen scraps and kitty litter. We usually have 2 small paper bags full of garbage per week, and if we had a compost, we'd have far less garbage than that even. This is great progress, because the whole point of this exercise has been to learn to live as less wasteful people.

-Sheri

Interview

Just before we moved to Fort Saint John we were interviewed about our project by Jenifer Norwell. Immediately after that we spent some time without proper internet. It took a while to post it but here we are!

Fort Saint John

Hello! It's been too long.

Although our blogging has faltered, the project has been going strong. We moved to Fort saint John, spent some time without proper internet, and got out of the blogging habit. We've faced a few challenges finding what we want in a small town with limited selection. Over all things have gone well.

We've had a lot of adventures since or last post. Right before we left we were interviewed by Jenifer Norwell (We'll post the video in the next few days). We've adjusted to sharing a home with non-plastic-abstainers (and they've cut back). I've been avoiding plastic in a work camp setting as well. It's been interesting.

-Miles

Bean Bags

Small observation today:

Today we stopped by one of our favorite veggie stores, and we noticed at the till that they were taking green beans from a cardboard box and putting them into plastic bags for 'convenient' sale. What would be so bad about selling them loose, like they do for bean sprouts? They lost at least one sale for doing that (I would have gone for some green beans). Hopefully in the future, more people will stand up and say 'no thank you' to items packaged wastefully, and then vendors will start to think twice before suffocating everything in plastic doom.

-Sheri

Bring it Back

Recently we've made a few plastic purchases in error, and some of them we've avoided putting into our box of shame (which is actually itself a plastic bag from that bridal fair) by bringing them back to the merchants we bought them from. For instance, my Valentine's Day rose from Miles came with a little water-holder-on-the-stem thingy, so we took that back to the florist because there's no reason it cannot be reused. We also bought a jar of mustard that had a plastic seal around the lid. The seal was practically invisible and most of the other jars of the same product did not have the seal. We returned that to the grocery store and exchanged it for one of its plastic-free brothers.

This isn't much different from a scenario at restaurants where a waitress may bring us something plasticky without thinking, such as crackers for our soup or candies with the bill. We will remind her in a friendly way about the plastic plan and they are always good sports about taking them away from us and reusing them for other restaurant patrons. Of course, this doesn't always work - if there's a straw, we have to take it. If there are dip cups or sandwich toothpicks with decorative foof on the ends, they can't be taken back because the restaurants will not reuse them.

We recently made a big slip-up in a restaurant and walked away with two foofed toothpicks and two straws, which we didn't even notice until partway through the meal, so engrossed were we in our conversation. It was weird to discover ourselves mindlessly sipping water with straws like that. We did manage to send the cracker packs back, though, and the candies that came with the bill. On the other hand, we went back to a restaurant that had previously accosted us with plastic and had a delightfully plastic-free meal - we had to be pretty diligent but we managed. Hopefully one day, our awareness will spread to the populace in general, and we won't need to be as hyper-diligent because our society's habits will have changed.

-Sheri

Been a while...

It's been a while since we last posted on here. It's not that we're losing interest in the project - o contraire mon frere - it's just that it's going so smoothly. Really this isn't as hard as I expected. We buy some items at different places than we used to, we do without a couple things that we like but overall it's not a big deal to do without plastic.

We do have some challenges on the horizon though. We're moving to Fort Saint John in a couple of weeks and not only will we need to find plastic free options in our new location but we will have fewer options in this smaller and more convenience oriented community. We're going to be pretty busy but we'll try to keep the posts coming.

-Miles

Valentine's Day

Due to conflicting schedules, I didn't get to see much of Sheri on Valentine's day. I spent my day busing around town running errands and buying groceries. I haven't been on a bus in a while and I really enjoyed it. Busing is better than driving for the following reasons:

• You don't need to worry about somebody hit-and-running your bus while it's parked
• You don't need to worry about your bus getting stolen or broken into
• You don't need to worry about getting in an accident (at least not the liability and insurance woes)
• You can read or do other stuff while traveling
• You can people watch and eavesdrop

 I won't be getting a bus pass though because they are plastic. We're being fairly dogmatic about our rules.

The downside of buses is that you need to carry everything you have with you. This can be tricky for multi-stop shopping. Fortunately none of the shops minded me walking past the til with already full bags. Unfortunately light bags get heavy the longer you carry them. Good exercise though.

My last stop was at Awesome Blossom to pick up a rose for Sheri. I was getting pretty tired and didn't even realize that the flower was wrapped in plastic and had a little plastic test tube looking thing on the stem. I felt dirty all the way home.

Sheri arrived home shortly after me and we had just enough time to walk over to Tumbleweeds pub and have a romantic Valentines Lupper (Sunch?). As usual we warned our server that we didn't want any plastic and that if we got any we'd need to put it in our box of shame. While she didn't give us any straws, she gave Sheri 2 disposable plastic dippy bowls made out of... plastic!

OK, I need to update our box of shame.

On the plus side, a teller at The Great Canadian Super Store was commending us on our use of mushroom bags for our bulk good when I mentioned our project and was given a high five. I estimate we get about nine enthusiastic reaction for every slightly weirded out reaction from people we tell about this project. Folks seem to like the idea, hopefully more people join in and we can start to make some market pull towards a more sustainable future.

-Miles

Take it back!

Today we went out for supper to Kelly O's. As usual we got our drinks without straws and our dipping sauce in a ceramic bowl instead of a throw-away plastic cup. Also par for the course, I managed to order more than I could eat in a sitting and therefore had leftovers. After running out to the car and finding we had not, in fact, packed reusable containers, we asked the waitress if they had a little tinfoil we could wrap my leftover baked potato in. They did, which worked out for us. I would rather not have used tinfoil because it's the same level of disposable one-use behaviour we are trying to avoid with this project, but at least metal is more easily reused than plastic is.

When we returned to the car after supper, we found a lovely glossy-paper (plasticized) ad slipped neatly under my wiper-blade. Reading it, we discovered that the generous garbage donor was a business just down the street from where we parked, so we brought it back to them. This caught them off guard and the young folk working there seemed a little weirded out, but at least now they know that not everyone wants their garbage. We explained to them why we don't want it, and they put it in their stack to go out in the next ad-littering spree, but at least they're now a little more aware. Even if it weren't plasticized, it would still be quite a nuisance. I really wish our society would pull its collective head out of its rump and stop being so selfishly wasteful and quit with the junk ads all the time. It's super inefficient and annoying as well.

-Sheri

Restaurants

Restaurants. These places are a minefield for plastic. Waitresses are always trying to give you plastic. Want a drink of refreshing water? Why not suck it through a tube of molded toxic plant fossils? Want a sammich? How about we decorate that for you with some garbage. Time for your bill? We'll give you some candies - each individually wrapped in a carcinogenic package laden with gender bending chemicals that will happily gum up the eco-system for the next 500-1000 years so that you can rest assured that your treat is sterile.

Since all these things are given so routinely even a waitress who is aware of our project will sometimes give us something without even realizing it. Because of food-safety issues, once it's placed on our table it's consumed. We need to get our waitress (we haven't had a single waiter since the project started) watching out for us and then be sure to make sure none of our orders come with consumable plastic. It's really easy for a waitress to forget about the container the dipping sauce comes in or something like that. So far everyone has been really good.

We picked up a straw for our Box o' Shame at Milestone's the other day due to some excessively good service - our waitress brought us water before we had hardly sat down never mind had a chance to warn her. Other than that and a trip to Harold's where our own lack of vigilance was to blame we've done pretty well. Sometimes our friends even join in in eschewing unnecessary waste. This makes me feel a bit less like an weirdo and a little more hopeful that our 'no plastic' culture could become mainstream.

-Miles

Bridal Fair

Yesterday we went to a bridal fair (Sheri and I are getting hitched :) ).  We got ambushed with plastic. We didn't even see it coming. We registered online ahead of time and when we got there we discovered that by doing so we had invited them to fill a plastic bag with plastic trinkets plastered with the names and contact info of various businesses that service the wedding industry. It's sort of like if somebody gave us (with the best of intentions) a bag of dead kittens that they'd just prepared especially for me. I can't get mad - they don't know any better, but I'm very disappointed and giving it back won't undo the damage.

The vast majority of our plastic consumption for the year is the result of that fair. We need a bigger box of shame.

Also, we can't find cat food without plastic so we had to buy that.

Other than that - our mission is going very well and hasn't been too difficult.

-Miles

Breakthroughs in Shopping

Over the last couple days, we've sourced out some great plastic-wrap-free items: cheese (for real this time), nacho chips, more fast food, and also shampoo and deodorant.

Cheese we found at Gary's European Sausage and Deli. They wrapped it in paper for us, and even the tape is paper. We also got lunchmeat from them, which is pretty awesome. It makes the sammiches on the serve-yourself-buns we bought at Save-on Foods so much nicer.

At Fresh is Best, we can make arrangements to swing by with our own containers when they're making stuff, and they will fill them with products such as nacho chips, taco shells, and even salsas and dips. They even have a salsa that has no garlic in it, so Miles can enjoy this particular snack as well. It's tropical and it's delicious.

When we finished up Thursday's shopping spree, we went to Burger King for supper. There, we were allowed to fill our own glasses with their fountain pop, and the sandwiches are wrapped in wax paper (when you fold the paper, it leaves a little white line which gives the wax coating away).

Friday we went to Kelowna to the Lush Cosmetics store. There, we found shampoo bars, soap, deodorant, bubble bath, and bath bombs, plus a few other products, that had no wrapping at all. We bought shampoo, bubble bath, deodorant and a bath bomb, and received a small shampoo-bar-sized tin as part of a promotion. The deodorants we chose came in paper wrap since we didn't have enough separate containers on us for everything, and they put things in tiny paper bags for us as well. Apparently their head office is attempting to come up with a toothpaste solution as well, so I imagine we'll be checking back with them in a few months (when our shampoo runs out) for an update.

-Sheri (who smells even better now!)

Community Support

When we started our research into this project, I don't think either of us thought we'd get as much help as we are getting from vendors around the city. I think we both thought this would be much more difficult than it is. Don't get me wrong; plastic is everywhere and being forced down our throats (literally and figuratively) everywhere, but where there are potential solutions, people are being very good about helping us out.

For instance, when we shop at Coopers, we can fill paper bags instead of plastic in the bulk section. We can also, we found out yesterday, bring our own containers to the deli, and so we can get meat and cheese this way (completely plastic-free dairy tally: ice cream sandwiches and deli cheese = 2; the plastic seal around the glass milk bottle tricked us). The cashiers are aware of our project (as we keep asking them what our boundaries are) and ask us how the project is going every time they see us, plastic-free, at the till.

At restaurants, waitresses have been helpful as well. At Boston Pizza, where we go for our cactus-cut fries fix, the dipping sauce (the crux of this appy) comes in a plastic cup, but the waitress told us it was ceramic and they washed them like any other dish, but then two minutes later, she told us she checked with the kitchen staff, who corrected her and told her it was plastic, but that they would happily serve it to us in a different, washable dish instead. She also served my smoothie without a straw and made sure we got no candies at the end of the meal.

Thank you, Kamloops, for supporting us in this project!

-Sheri

*UPDATE* We went to Coopers to capitalize on our new-found info, containers from home firmly in hand. The deli clerk was able to put our lunchmeat directly on their scale, but when shaving slices, she 'had to' use a small sheet of plastic to catch the meat from the slicer. She also told us they don't in fact slice cheese, so I guess we can cross that off as a viable dairy source, too. However, surely there's another deli someplace in town that can slice cheese for us and use our container as well.

Anything Worth Doing is Worth Overdoing

While we started out trying to avoid plastic in packaging, the longer we go the more we find ourselves saying no to products with any plastic in them.

For me, I think it's because I've been reading blogs and articles, and watching documentaries about plastic. It's not that I never did before but once we started forcing ourselves to be conscientious shoppers the information is no longer something I might as well forget since I can't do anything about it anyways. Instead of being helpless cogs in a system I disprove of, I'm now throwing my economic weight behind a sustainable future.I'm liking it.

-Miles

Irony

Yesterday we watched a documentary ("Tapped") about bottled water and its various ills. It covered the societal problems with water being legally 'stolen' from communities and, according to locals, causing drought conditions. It explained that bottled water is far less regulated and tends to be a bacteria laden cesspool of toxic chemicals. It covered the health problems people living near plastic manufacturing plants suffered from. Finally they covered how the plastic all ends up in the ocean and chokes the ecosystem.

At this point in the show we watched as Captain Charles Moore, an ocean researcher, collected samples of plastic from a beach. Ironically he put the samples into Ziploc bags. The stuff is so pervasive we take it for granted. This guy is a crusader for awareness of the damage that plastic consumption causes the ocean and there he is collecting samples in a bag that will probably end up in a gyre one day and hang out there killing fishes for a few hundred years.

-Miles

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Many people know the Three Rs of waste management: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle. These are great foundations for responsible solutions to our ever increasing consumption habits. Many people also know that these fall into an order of preference, or hierarchy:

Reduce
Reuse
Recycle

To reduce our waste intake is clearly the best of the three, since it results in less waste being introduced into the system in the first place. Reusing is the next best, in that stuff has already been introduced to the world and now has continued use. Recycling is also good, but not as good as the other two, because in a way, it's waste, though in a way, it's also reusing, since we reuse the recycled material.

This project is, for us, all about reduction, and in a big way, specifically, of course, with regards to plastic. We are trying to eliminate it completely, in fact, but as you know, we are making the odd exception (where we cannot avoid buying plastic without harming our health) and we make the odd mistake as well (peek in our box of shame for examples).

For me, this project is about massive reduction in non-biodegradable substances (particularly plastic). The containers we buy during this project have so far included glass, metal, and paper. Paper, in particular, is something we are buying more of than we used to, but our volume of paper consumption is still far less than our plastic consumption used to be. Paper is biodegradable, and so we are not as fussed about consuming this as we are about plastic consumption, although we still understand that using paper means using trees. Trees are replenishable, after all, but we would still like to moderate how many we are responsible for killing. The paper bags that we use for buying bulk foods are often reusable as well. We buy the food in these bags and then take it home and transfer it to our reusable plastic containers, and then shake the bags out in case there are food particles in them. We write on the bags what was in them before, with the intent of reusing these bags for the same products again.

-Sheri

Some Clarification

I thought I'd take some time to clarify what exactly our goals are; more specifically my goals, since Sheri might have a slightly different take on the project. We say we are eliminating our consumption of plastic packaging but that is not perfectly accurate. Really we are trying to avoid disposable plastic at the consumer level. For instance, we avoid straws at restaurants, Ziploc bags, and plastic wrap. We do not avoid products that have been shipped to stores in plastic packaging. This would not leave us many options and probably doesn't account for the bulk of the waste. 

We are hoping that by forcing ourselves off of plastic for a year we will, with help of friends and readers, find solutions that allow us to live conveniently with as little plastic waste as possible. We're also hoping that our Solution Exchange serves as a how-to manual for people who would like to reduce their ecological footprint but are too busy to dedicate a lot of time or effort to it.

So why are we picking on plastic when most of it can be recycled anyways? Recycling anything, with the exception of compost, is never good for the environment; it's only less bad that disposal. Recycling takes energy. Recycling plastic requires transport, breaking down, more transport, remolding, and more transport. Harmful chemicals are used and released into the air and then eventually inhaled or eaten (particularly by apex predators such as humans) every time a new plastic item is made. Also, plastic can only be recycled so many times before it is nothing but toxic waste. Plastic is wonderful useful stuff that opens up a world of possibilities for humanity but I believe it should be used in moderation and our regulatory agencies need a better understanding of the potential threats it poses.

Also, there are definitely some harmful chemical effects associated with plastic. I couldn't list all the toxic chemicals and their various harmful effects without making this a very dry read. You can go to this page at Answers.com if you'd like to learn more. The thing is that all the harms that plastics do are too small to care about by themselves but they accumulate over time. They accumulate not only in our bodies but in our eco-system. Plastics usually take around 450-1000 years to biodegrade. A piece of plastic can kill an animal or plant and then still be around to keep killing for up to another 1000 years. Multiply our individual consumptions by the growing population of the world during the period for which plastic will take to biodegrade and it starts to seem apocalyptic.

Fortunately, humans are smart and, I believe, we're totally capable of cleaning up our mess if we get our act together. Until we figure that out though, we can get our act together by minimizing our mess. We can do that by creating market pressure to reduce plastic packaging. If enough people ask for less plastic on their products, savvy business persons will oblige!

-Miles

No Milk for Miles

Two days ago we finally got some Gort's Milk in a glass bottle. We brought it home and I opened it up. I tore the plastic disposable seal off the lid and cursed because I realized there was a plastic disposable seal on the lid. Not only does this add to our box of shame, it means aside from powdered milk in the bulk section, we have no milk options available.

Very not cool.

- Miles

A Dark Day for Plastic Abstinence

Yesterday we went on a quest to find the famed glass bottled milk of Gort renowned to be located at Heartland Foods. After an extensive search we found the address listed on the map; 709 Tagish. This turned out to be their old location. The nice people now located there redirected us to the new location on Tranquille.  Their new location is really well hidden.

Once inside we learned that while they do sell glass bottled milk, there was only one bottle in stock and it expired that day. We will return once it's been replenished.

Next we went grocery shopping. We needed a few ingredients for a dish Sheri wants to make; Chicken broth and cooking sherry. We bought canned broth. I've heard that some cans are lined with plastic. So far we are not letting that stop us unless we know a can is lined with plastic so we bought the canned broth. We couldn't buy cooking sherry because every bottle had plastic seals wrapped around the lid. We'll use a substitute but it's always disappointing when we can't find a product without plastic on it.

So far our day has been challenging and we've met with limited success - but it gets worse.

At this point we're running too far behind to make supper and we are hungry. We decided to go to Harold's. Restaurants are tricky. First they ambushed us with straws. We knew we should have mentioned it when we first arrived but we were both careless. Straws aren't really packaging by most definitions but they are just as disposable.

Next they stuck some toothpicks on Sheri's sammich. Wrapped around the toothpicks was a little cellophane decoration. I think this qualifies as packaging. Sheri disagrees. In either event we agree that both the straws and the toothpicks go against the principle of our endeavor.

Six days into year and we now have two dishonorable mentions for our box of shame. Three hundred and fifty-nine days to go.

-Miles

Milk and Cheese

I have a lead on bottled milk and cheese! Gort's Gouda sells both at the Heartland Foods. I'd never heard of the place but it's in town. The cheese will have to be Gouda and we'll need to buy 4 kg if we want to get it sans plastic. We're going to check it out tomorrow.

-Miles

Grocery Shopping

Today we went grocery shopping for the first time during this project. We bought fruits and veggies, but we had to put the asparagus back because there were plastic tags affixed to every bundle. We went to our favorite fresh veggies store, but we didn't buy lettuce, which was on our list, because they were all wrapped in plastic as well. We went to the meat shop next door and they agreed to put our purchases in our reusable containers, which is pretty helpful for us.

For dairy products, we are severely restricted in what we can purchase, since almost every dairy product is packaged in plastic, but we did find ice cream sandwiches that are wrapped in paper and stored in cardboard boxes. I always knew ice cream sandwiches were my heroes. This is obviously a suboptimal solution, but it's a tasty suboptimal solution, so I'm happy enough for the time being anyways.

-Sheri

Kicking off the New Year

On New Year's Day, we decided to test our plastic-free boundaries by eating out. Since this is a holiday, most restaurants near us were closed, so we turned to fast food. We were pleased to find out that you can ask for your sandwich not to be placed in a plastic bag. Also, the paper wrap is waxed paper and the meat slices are separated in their sandwich trays with paper. We happily indulged and took our sandwiches home to enjoy.

I also spent copious amounts of time playing video games today. Depending on what kind of video games you play, this could be a problem, since most of them come in plastic cases these days because they are on discs that need some babying to prevent scratching. However, the game I delved into today was a digital download, so not only is there no plastic packaging, there's no packaging at all, because there's no item at all. Hello, future!

-Sheri

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to our blog, where we chronicle our adventures through a consumer-driven society with a very interesting restriction on what we allow ourselves to purchase. We are not going to buy anything packaged in plastic this year, unless there is a health risk involved in eschewing a product altogether (such as medication). We have several goals with this project. We are doing this project:

• to gain and create awareness of how pervasive plastic packaging has become.
• to reduce our contribution to the fantastic and unnecessary amount of waste packaging creates.
• to indirectly influence the amount of plastic being introduced into the landfills, and more importantly, into our world.
• to lessen plastic contamination of our foods and beverages.

In preparation, we did a little bit of research and scouting to find out how we could still purchase the things we need and enjoy, without making a lot of sacrifices. Some things are more difficult to find than others, which simply means we need to try a little harder to find solutions that allow us the things we want to or need to have. We're not going to spill the beans on everything we've learned here in the introduction, but we will be sharing our knowledge a lot in other posts on this blog.

This is our journey.