Are we turning into plastic people?

Did you ever stop to realize how many products in your house now come in plastic?  I realized this when I saw that a lot of what I haul to the transfer station to recycle is plastic.

Look in our fridge and you’d see a plastic V-8 bottle, jam bottle, yogurt containers, lettuce containers, a buttermilk bottle, and a jug of Maine maple syrup.

Look in our cupboards and you would find half a dozen pill and supplement bottles, a couple of chocolate and candied ginger containers, a peanut butter jar, vinegar and salad oil bottles – all plastic.

The bathroom has plastic shampoo and conditioner bottles, hand lotion, toothpaste tube, witch hazel, hydrogen peroxide, liquid hand soap containers, aloe Vera tube, and 20 various pill, skin and eye medication bottles – all made of plastic.

Your computer, car, printer, and bike – all have plastic components – look around – you’ll be amazed.

I read somewhere that the production of plastic has increased to 300 million tons from around 1.7 million tons in 1950. Of course many of us recycle our plastics, yet the estimate is that only about a quarter of plastics are recycled, and even though a few of us may recycle our plastics they will never biodegrade.

Instead, plastics can leach toxic chemicals into landfills or oceans. And that brings up another problem:  our oceans have tons and tons of tiny plastic bits floating in them, some microscopic, some the size of a grain of salt that fish swallow.

Then we eat the fish. Plastics we might have once used, then, may end up as part of our bodies.

And this is made even more possible when you learn that a global study completed last year found that 83% of the world’s tap water has microscopic plastic pieces in it. In the United States, 94% of our tap water has microscopic plastic pieces in it the study showed.

You have to wonder – are we turning into plastic people?

Bill Baker

About Bill Baker

Bill's interest in a clean place to live is rooted in growing up in the country – a cornfield across the road and fields, sandstone cliffs and hundreds of acres of woods where he spent many hours.