Feral Bags

When we first began The Experiment, we imagined we might run out of re-usable plastic bags at some point. They can only be washed, dried and stuffed into a kitchen drawer so many times, we figured. But we've just passed the five-month point of our year, and our kitchen drawer is as crammed as ever.

For one thing, if we treat them gently, the bags do last. For another, they continue to come into our lives even though we shun them. We have not taken one single virgin plastic produce or shopping bag from a store these past five months, but other people give us stuff in plastic bags, and we snag them from public places when we can see that they're not going to get recycled.

Also, they multiply in the night of their own accord. Plastic bags need to be spayed and neutered.

Full Disclosure

We’ve added an item to the parameters – exceptions to the no-plastics rule -- and not for any profound reason except that we don’t want to give these things up: aseptic containers of soup and milk alternatives (the containers are waxed cardboard, but they have a small plastic cap.)

We’re both dairy-free; I put rice milk on my daily oatmeal and use it in place of milk in recipes, and Rick considers chocolate soy milk to be one of the four food groups (along with mustard, barbecue sauce and cookies.) As for soup, we both depend on it for our lunches. We don’t do sandwiches any more (sliced bread comes in plastic bags, deli meat comes in plastic bags) so soup is a less-plastic-laden alternative. I had lofty dreams of making homemade soup on a regular basis, but as you’ve probably perceived by now, I resist cooking, and I’m already challenging my resistance. I have been making some soups, but not enough to keep us well-lunched seven days a week. So there it is. If I were a better person, I would do things differently. But I’m not, so I don’t.

Pretzels

My very favorite snack in the world is one I’ve had to give up this year: big hard pretzels, the kind, as my friend Janet says, “that lacerate your gums when you bite them – God I love those.” The kind you can get in grocery stores around here are made by a company called Snyder’s of Hanover. I’m actually a member of the Snyder’s of Hanover Pretzel Eater's Club, which sends me coupons for discounted boxes of pretzels. Sometimes I daydream about taking a tour of the Snyder’s factory in Hanover, PA. Imagine the glorious smell! Imagine the free samples!

But of course, in the interest of freshness, the pretzels are packaged in a plastic bag inside their box, so I’ve been living without them for several months, and feeling deprived.

I’m also a great fan of the big hot pretzels you get at the ball park, and I consider them an able substitute for Snyder’s. But until recently there didn’t seem to be a way to get them in Portland without attending a ball game. Oh, there’s a place in the mall that sells them, but those aren’t real pretzels; they’re just pretzel shaped bread.

Then I saw an article in a local foodie magazine about a baker from Bavaria named Edgar who makes proper pretzels here in town. German bakers go through three years of training before they can be certified to make pretzels, so Edgar’s the real deal. The article said that he only sold his pretzels wholesale to other bakeries. But I was having a birthday, so my wonderful husband called Edgar up and asked if he would sell us a batch in honor of my special day. Edgar said sure. He baked me up a dozen pretzels and delivered them right into my greedy little hands fresh from the oven when we went to pick them up.

Aren’t they gorgeous?

A Low-Waste Noel

It being Christmas, we had to have cookies, and their being cookies, they had to be chocolate chip. But chips come in a plastic bag! So this week found me on the kitchen floor with a hammer, smashing a one-pound bar of Trader Joe's 71% dark chocolate into bit-sized chunks. They made very toothsome treats.

The season has brought other quiet pleasures as well. We set the alarm and got up at midnight to watch the lunar eclipse the other night, but because we live in Portland, our plans were foiled by cloud cover, so we went back to bed and enjoyed the eclipse on Youtube the next morning.

Later that day, at precisely 3:38 p.m., we went out (teeth chattering) to the back yard and lit a tiny fire in our Mexican chimenea to observe the winter solstice. We stood out there just long enough to listen to the appropriate segment of Vivaldi's Four Seasons on my cell phone.


And I've been repurposing items from the recycling bin, making tree ornaments from spaghetti jar lids (they make nice round metal picture frames) and old cardboard and magazines and popsicle sticks and aluminum pot pie pans. Our tree is newly graced with images of Piglet, Pooh and Tigger; Olympic shot putter Michelle Carter; biologist E.O. Wilson (my hero); and Lady Gaga.

Mauled by Malls

Last week we traveled to Tucson to check in on after Rick's mother, who is 91. Margaret is a dear soul for whom we would do anything. Anything, in this case, included leaving our political values at the shore and wading neck-deep into Retail America.

Tucson's city center is a place of considerable charm, with historic architecture, small businesses and a well-developed community of creatives. Out beyond the downtown core, however, are miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of indistinguishable strip malls, which we crisscrossed again and again as we searched for watch batteries, large print books, sun visors. We put 600 miles on our rental car and never left town, doing our part to warm the planet and generating our own little mountain of trash at chain restaurants as we went.

The westering sun on the mountains, the saguaro cacti marching up the hillside, the jack rabbits and javelinas at our campground were an insufficient antidote to the driving and driving and driving and driving and driving and the low-slung box stores stretching to the horizon and the open canals that carry water through the desert from the Colorado.

The sheer acreage of the sprawl, and the fact that most of it is dedicated to consumption, left us cranky and  homesick. Among the rotating Christmas trees and bobbing mechanical Santas, under the worst holiday hits ever recorded (hand-selected to be piped into every shopping center), I wanted to shake outer Tucson by the shoulders and cry THIS IS NOT CHRISTMAS. This is a horrible, joyless simulacrum of Christmas from which all inner peace has been siphoned out. This is acre upon acre upon hundreds of acres of pointlessness, each component of which has its own tiny zip-lock baggie, packed together with others in a plastic box and stuffed into a plastic shopping bag for its short trip from the mall to the landfill.

This may just be apocalyptic thinking brought on by nausea and crushing boredom, but on the other hand I could be right: in a hundred years, I think, there will be no Tucson as we know it. There simply will not be enough water and energy to maintain this grotesqueness. These endless miles of shopping opportunities will become a vast and trashy ghost town. And in a thousand years, what was once a 195-square-mile metropolis will be the site of an archaelogical dig, revealing layer upon fascinating layer of a strange and incomprehensible ancient culture.

Bad News, Good News

The Experiment is humming along, so well that I worry about running out of things to write about. Within the parameters, it’s been surprisingly easy to eliminate plastic from our lives.  And without the parameters, it would be impossible.

I’ve flown out of state twice since my plastically-disastrous trip to Key West in October, and fared no better on either excursion. And here at home Rick and I had a plumbing problem that required going down to the crawl space under the house with a flashlight. A flashlight needs batteries, which aren’t sold in bulk; what were we to do, carry a torch to the cellar? (To his credit, Rick sought out and found minimally-packaged batteries, shrink-wrapped in sets of eight). Also, I spent my November freebie on a netbook – an extravagant use of a freebie, I think – because of a perceived (mainly professional)  need to be connected to the internet and have access to word-processing while traveling in and out of town. 

I think this may prove to be the main insight of the year’s experience: it is easy to reduce, but nearly impossible to eliminate, our modern dependence on plastic. To do so would require extreme effort, some measure of deprivation  and a monumental change in the way we go about being alive and human.  It would not present an imitable model, and we’d probably make ourselves obnoxious to our friends.

That said, we are finding daily life not much changed. We are not inconvenienced by our new regimen. However clear our dependence is, it’s also obvious to us that our society goes through much, much, much more plastic than is necessary, and it’s this wantonness that bothers us.  I might need prescription meds that come in plastic vials, but I don’t need a sword-shaped plastic stir stick in my black tea.  I might even need a netbook, but I don’t need a plastic bag to tote it home in (actually I was impressed by its minimalist packaging, mostly cardboard with a small plastic handle for carrying. You go, Asus.)

We’re not zealots – just committed, if slightly eccentric, people trying to draw attention to a mounting problem that we think could be at least mitigated with a little mindfulness.

A Close Shave

It's all about line-drawing, this business, and one place we've drawn a line is at shaving cream. It's available, of course, only in cans with plastic caps. Granted the can is metal, and it lasts a long time -- but still, if we were truly pure of heart, we would stop shaving altogether. But Rick feels scruffy in a beard. And I'm very uncomfortable with hairy legs and armpits. There's a good deal of demographic overlap between women committed to waste reduction and women who don't shave. I live among a people who tend to regard shaving as anti-feminist, unnatural and silly. Not I. Unshaven, I feel like a great stinking ape, especially in ballet class.

Research reveals that there is a whole community of "wet shavers" who use a boar-bristle brush and a special soap in a special bowl to work up a lather for shaving, like in cowboy movies. Who knew? But those brush handles are probably made of plastic (unless you get a high-end porcelain one. Does one really need a high-end shaving brush?) I also have concerns about taking bristles from boars. Not to mention the time and space commitment involved.

We could be truer to our cause, and live in solidarity with the homeless, the women's movement, and the endangered boars. Instead, we draw a line.