Summer brings the opportunity to enjoy nature, outdoor adventure, and water play. Alameda is a wonderful city to experience all three with easy access to Crown Beach, Crab Cove, Shoreline Park, and quick trips to the redwoods, rivers, and lakes. Thanks to community volunteers, these experiences are often viewed as plastic-free. Yet the reality is that millions of pounds of plastic are dumped into oceans, rivers, and lakes each year, entering aquatic ecosystems and some of it eventually making its way back up onto land.
[1]This month is Plastic Free July [3], when we can all focus on reducing our use of single-use plastics.
“This isn’t something we can simply recycle or clean our way out of,” the Plastic Free Foundation stresses. But we can make a difference by taking small steps to curb plastic consumption, and the Plastic Free July challenge [4]is a great way to get started. We can take the pledge and see lots of ways to reduce our plastic usage.
Started in 2011 in Australia, the Plastic Free July challenge has stretched worldwide to encourage and support people of all ages and cultures to choose to refuse single-use plastic.
In addition to bringing our reusable bags when shopping, think of all of the other single-use plastic items we can eliminate. We can say no to plastic straws and use glass straws instead. For example, the Rotary Club of Alameda recently switched from plastic utensils for weekly luncheons to bamboo utensils, so Rotarians now have zero-waste luncheons each week. We can simply decline plastic utensils when getting takeout.
[5]Shampoo and conditioner bars work great and eliminate the plastic bottles. These can be purchased at Replenish Marketplace [6] on Webster Street, along with many cleaning essentials that can be filled in reusable glass containers—bring your own or the store can supply them.
Skip the plastic produce bags, and use cloth bags instead—those can be purchased at Replenish Marketplace as well. Use a reusable mug for your beverage purchases instead of the paper cups with plastic lids. Laundry sheets eliminate the big plastic jugs for laundry detergent.
Reducing single-use plastics not only prevents pollution but also protects the climate. Every plastic item we use takes energy to get the raw materials, manufacture it, ship it, and ultimately dispose of it, with greenhouse gas emissions at each step in the life cycle. So the less single-use stuff we use, the better for the climate.
Embrace Plastic Free July and be part of the solution to plastic pollution while you help protect the climate.
Joyce Mercado is an author and member of Community Action for a Sustainable Alameda (CASA) and the president of the Rotary Club of Alameda. Her columns are collected at alamedapost.com/Joyce-Mercado [7]. She can be reached at [email protected] [8].
Alameda resident Laria Pippen is the founder and owner of Replenish Marketplace.