Most people in the developed world know that plastic is bad for our environment, some even know certain kinds of plastics are harmful if used with food, and a lot of us are searching for alternatives. Plastic is everywhere; we find it in our clothes, cars, sports, toothbrushes, electronics, mattress, furniture, and toys. It’s hard to buy something without plastic involved at several levels — from the debit card to the product packaging. Plastic has become such an integral part of our lives, change requires new laws for businesses and ultra conscious, creative individuals (like you and me!).

Did you know that plastic bags and Styrofoam are two of the top three items littered on our planet , more than half of all thermoplastics eventually sink in seawater, and 8 out of 10 water bottles will end up your local dump ? A million plastic bags are used every minute worldwide  and can take hundreds of years to decompose — Styrofoam as long as 1 million years.

The facts are staggering, but even I was shocked to find out from World Wildlife Foundation, that plastic bags choke and suffocate turtles to death when they mistake them for jellyfish — their favorite food! What a bummer that would be. Could you imagine biting into your favorite food only to die a torturous death?

I’m a busy, working mom of two, who struggles to shrink our carbon footprint as much as possible. Since our family has learned the facts on plastics, we’ve made a lot of changes in our house. We use reusable water bottles (Our favorites are SIGG  and Klean Kanteen). Next time you go to by that plastic water bottle, hold it up and know that you’d have to fill that bottle one fourth full of oil to equal the amount of energy it toke to produce it .

Of course everywhere you turn now in your local grocery store there are options for reusable grocery bags. Some states, like Washington, are charging for plastic shopping bags, and other countries, like China, have just outright banned the evil critters. Before you throwaway that pair of well loved jeans or T-shirt, checkout which parts are still usable and might make a good shopping bag if cut up and reassembled possibly keeping the ‘outfit together’.

Once the news about the neurotoxins that off-gas from plastics — Bisphenol A (BPA) and Brominated flame retardants (PBDEs) -- we started using our plastic food storage container for storing nails and bolts in the shed and bought some very reasonable glass containers at K-mart. Glass is amazing. Did you know not only is it reusable but it can be recycled an indefinite number of times? We also rely on glass mason jars and reuse things like peanut butter jars to store leftovers, can our own food, or pack a lunch. Did you know you can freeze the mason jars without the rounded ‘shoulder’? We hardly ever buy a can of soup anymore; our freezer is full of quart and pint size frozen homemade soups.

Maybe you’ve already started using reusable hot and cold drink containers, reusable shopping bags, and glass food storage constrainers. So tell me, what have you found to substitute the other plastic bags in your life? You know the sandwich, freezer, ziploc, put anything in them, they don’t leak bags? OMG this was the biggest challenge for my family. When I told my husband we had to loose the plastic baggie he came home with the half size baggies and grabbed the tinfoil (which isn’t much better). He still insist he needs a box of ziploc freezer bags and I wash them so we can reuse them until they go to the recycling center.

I’ve found a few solution to our addiction to the baggie. We use the natural, wax paper sandwich bags for our lunches. They work fine for sandwiches and most snack foods (e.g. Grapes or trail mix). Wrapping a sandwich in a cloth napkin even works in some lunch boxes. After purchasing 6 organic cotton net bags for packaging produce for the trip home from the grocery store, we hardly need to reuse the plastic produce bags we collected from all our previous trips to the store. Last on the list are cloth bags to use for purchasing bulk foods, like grains and nuts. I have an old table cloth with a tight weave I’m going to make into bags. If you don’t sew then checkout http://www.ecobags.com/ or search the net; there are a lot of options.

Old habits may die hard but think of that turtle with a baggie in its gullet and give yourself 29 days to change one thing at a time. Before you know it, you’ll be walking with a lighter carbon footprint, and helping to slow down global warming.

If you have any ideas for replacing the plastics we use in our homes, please share your secrets with the rest of us!

Reduce, reuse, recycle! 

For more information on plastics also see  Dipdive's Take Our Planet Back Channel, http://takeourplanetback.dipdive.com/blog/525