How do we discourage the plastics companies—and all of the companies that use their products—from creating and using MORE plastic? Without the burden of cost ending up on the consumer?

Seth Godin mentions that the only real change will come through collective action on the part of us as citizens or via the government through taxation. (Check out his great podcast episode on the topic here.)

It worked for cigarettes; I assume it would work for plastic reduction as well.

But I feel that, in the short run, it would hurt all of us as consumers… because we really don’t have a choice. And you’d better believe that the people with money invested in plastic will make sure WE feel it before they do…

Individual Action

A couple of years ago, my wife and I went on a no-plastic, “reduce our waste” crusade.

We stopped buying drinks in plastic bottles…

We only used reusable grocery bags at the store…

We severely cut back on food and packaged goods…

We went to a more whole-foods diet (good for our health AND for the environment)…

We started using compostable garbage bags that we could compost ourselves.

My wife even persuaded a local restaurant to start selling glass bottles for to-go sauces that people could bring in and refill for a reduced price.

This is only a smattering of what we did to reduce waste…

The problem that we ran into was no matter what we did, we couldn’t get most of our food without massive amounts of plastic.

Our stores didn’t sell eggs in cardboard cartons. Nor did any of the local farmers we knew.

Every single piece of meat that we bought was wrapped in a pound of plastic. They wouldn’t allow us to bring in containers of our own… Or even follow our request for it to be wrapped in paper instead.

We couldn’t even go vegetarian—getting our protein through beans, yogurt, and other non-meat sources—without having it packaged in plastic bags or plastic cartons. All our stores had also gotten rid of the giant dispensers for grains and such… So we couldn’t bring our own bags for that either.

The Nail in the Coffin

The futility of it all became clear when I saw what a major corporation (which will remain nameless) was doing with plastic.

They were shipping tiny pieces of hardware—each of which was about the size of a pencil tip…

Each wrapped in plastic… Each sealed in its own plastic, Ziplock bag…

Mailed in its own bubble-wrap-lined mailing envelope.

And they were shipping hundreds of these to hundreds of locations around the world… On a regular basis.

I knew then and there that our individual action wouldn’t make even the tiniest of dents in the waste problem we faced.

Individual Action vs. Systemic Problems

We’ve continued our personal waste-free crusade, simply because it makes US feel better about our actions. But the discouragement is real.

I don’t really have any answers today. Because taking individual action to solve systemic problems doesn’t make much of a difference…

So I pose the question again: how do we dissuade these companies from using plastic without the burden of the cost—and all the work—ending up on consumers?

We aren’t creating the waste—those are the massive corporations who save money by using it. And who are doing it without thinking of the second- and third-order consequences of their actions.

There aren’t many alternatives for individual consumers… And the plastic is being created ANYWAY. So it feels like we don’t have a choice.

And when we have no choice, there’s nothing that we can do, and it doesn’t look like there will be better choices for quite a while.