Plastic verbiage

I just bought a new toilet brush, and it's 100% plastic free: some kind of wood handle with coconut husk bristles. Yay, me! 

Actually, my toilet bowl brush is really a fairly pointless example for me to use to describe reducing plastic in our world. When you walk by all those overflowing garbage cans on trash day, you can be pretty sure they're not filled to the brim with plastic toilet brushes. It's been longer than I can count since I purchased our previous toilet brush (a decade ago? I'm not sure). In fact, the only reason I bought a new one now is that we gifted our previous one to N-son, who was [you-don't-want-to-know-how-bad] urgently in need of cleaning his own bathroom. Usually, when I replace a missing household item, I try to scout yard sales or so-called thrift stores, but for obvious reasons I wasn't taking that approach this time. 

If organic toilet brushes are a fairly pointless example of plastic reduction, what's a point-full example? The answer I want to build up to is "single-use plastic", but to get to that, I want to talk about verbs.  I totally love verbs; they're sooo much more useful than nouns.

Plastic, in and of itself, isn't evil. It has no immortal soul, no agency, no will . . . it's not that plastic is good or bad in and of itself. But what we *do* with plastic has good or bad repercussions. Using a plastic pen that I found on the sidewalk instead of buying a new metal or wooden pen is, I claim, a good environmental choice. Accepting a cheap pen that I don't want from an exhibit vendor, and then tossing it in the trash because I don't like it as much as the other five pens I already have -- that's a (small) bad environmental choice.

When people (like me) say that "plastic is bad", this is a short-hand notation for some of the following negative aspects of the life and non-death of plastic:

• producing plastic uses up natural resources in a one-way cycle that never allows us to recover those original resources;
• delivering plastic from its point(s) of manufacture, to the store, and then to our homes, adds to global carbon emissions,
• moving plastic garbage from our homes to the trash collection facilities is a hazardous job (more hazardous than law enforcement or EMT work) that is undertaken often by people of color and other marginalized members of the community,
• sorting plastic garbage is not done by machines, but again by people, and is another job that is hazardous to its workers' health, and again disproportionately affects minorities,
• "recycling" plastic is a misnomer: it's actually "down-cycled", not available to be reused for its previous purpose,
• the vast majority of plastic is either burned (sending toxic microparticles into the air), or landfilled in poor communities (adding to racial health disparities), or spilled into the environment in ways that pollute our land and water, endanger marine and terrestrial animals, and enter the food chain with long-term adverse effects on the health of us all.

In other words, what is bad about plastic is (a) creating it in the first place and (b) disposing of it.   Focusing on single-use plastic gets most effectively at both of those issues.  

[Okay, another bad verb in this litany of woes is "eating plastic" -- which we do indirectly when we eat things that ate plastic, or directly when we heat up food stored in plastic. I'll rant about food storage containers, which may or may not be "single-use", separately. But mostly, this month, I'm going to focus on what's in our garbage cans and not on what's on our shelves.]

When a friend is hurting, we ask what can I do?  That's an awesome attitude: to think about action we can take, whether we're helping our friends or family, or helping protect our world.  But right now, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to scrub the toilet.  More later.