Climate Change & Plastic, Connecting the Dots- Climate Mama News

It’s been called one of the “greatest inventions of all time!” Hasn’t it made our lives easier, more convenient, and yes, more disposable? Affirmative to all those things. Plastic is also a significant contributor to serious health and environmental issues affecting not only our bodies, the air we breath, the food and water we consume, the health of our oceans and waterways, but in addition, one of the most damaging – perhaps unintended – and devastating consequences is accelerated human caused climate change.

What’s the connection here? Did you know that the base ingredients in most plastics are fossil fuels, aka petroleum or oil? Lets focus the lens on just one example of our incredible thirst for plastics, in the form of plastic water bottles. According to National Geographic: “Americans buy more bottled water than any other country, more than 29 BILLION bottles a year which requires around 17 MILLION barrels of crude oil, enough to keep 1 MILLION cars operating for a year.” This is more than 3x the amount of oil that was spilled into the Gulf in the summer of 2010! As a visual, imagine that the plastic water bottle your friend is currently sipping on is 1/4 full of oil, that’s how much oil goes into making just one plastic water bottle.

Remember, this is just the oil used for water bottles in the USA. What about what all the other plastic items used in the USA and around the world? Or even just the plastic water bottles in use worldwide! It boggles the mind and becomes one of those things that is just too hard to get our arms around. What’s important to “take away” is that as our plastic demand increases, so does our use of oil, and subsequently so does the build up of human caused greenhouse gases polluting our atmosphere and accelerating human caused global warming.

Look around you from the clothes you are wearing, to the computer you use, the flooring, furniture, linens, cups, pots, pans and dishes in your home, the car you drive, the packaged goods you buy, the toys your kids play with, even the credit cards you use everyday, almost everything we touch has plastic in it.

Take a minute at dinner tonight (or the next time you have a chance to sit down with the kids in your life) and look around you, play “eye spy” and see how many things you can name, just in the room you are in that are made from or have plastic as part of their make up. You will be amazed, and then, horrified! Our family did this and we were all amazed how “plastic” our kitchen really is! Never thought about it that way before! Then we tried to imagine living without those plastic things in our lives. Living in the suburbs we are surrounded by big “box” grocery stores. We don’t have the luxury of some bigger cities or metro areas that have butchers, bakers, fishmongers and fruit stands in the neighborhood or even down the block. It is sometimes difficult if not impossible to find them. It wouldn’t be easy or simple to stop our dependence on plastics in our daily lives. Trying to live “plastic free” is certainly a challenge. We have an addiction in this country, and in our home, that we didn’t fully realize until this week. And like many addictions, it isn’t going to be easy to quit, but we are going to try! Take the first step with us and sign the REFUSE Pledge, sponsored by the Plastic Pollution Coalition, and refuse single use and disposable plastics!