30 Days Without Single-Use Plastics _ One Small Step _ NowThis

There are now more microplastics in the ocean than stars in the galaxy. And it's all connected back to our insane consumption of plastic. That's why this month, I'm giving up single-use plastics. I got my sandwiches, no plastic involved. Getting ice cream, and I tried a flavor, and they gave me this. So I did my grocery shopping without using any plastic. I'm Lucy Biggers, and this is One Small Step. Since the 1950s, plastic waste has grown dramatically. From virtually nothing 60 years ago, to 300 million tons in 2015. And 50% of that waste is single-use. Lots of it ends up here, with millions of tons polluting our environment and oceans each year. Rebecca Prince-Ruiz started Plastic Free July in 2011. Now 3.4 million people from 177 countries participate in the challenge each year. I didn't set out to start a challenge or a movement. I just set out to change myself and my family after going to a recycling facility and just seeing how much waste that we produce. And I think we're so disconnected from our waste. We just don't realize the more that we do to reduce, reuse, refuse, rethink our waste in the first place, it's just a much bigger impact that we're going to have. This month, I'm challenging myself to avoid and find alternatives to single-use plastic. I understand that skipping plastic may not be an option for differently-abled people or for people with children. I also know that I'm privileged to be able to try this in the first place. Still, I'm going to do the best that I can for what works with my lifestyle. This is my first day at work with this new commitment. So I'm going to go get some breakfast. Normally I would get like a granola bar, but granola bars are in plastic. So I'm going to get a croissant because I know that the bakery is going to give it to me in paper. Thanks so very much. Thank you so much. Have a great day. I cook the end of the day and I'm about to get to my train home and I'm really hungry and I'm realizing one of the hardest parts of this challenge is going to be snacking because all snacks are in plastic. Almost every snack package, chip bag, candy wrapper, all of those flexible, multi-layer plastic pouches, trash. They are not widely recycled. Okay. So for us, the rigid plastics move through our system really smoothly. Once you get that flexibility, now maybe it's blowing around. It might be difficult, more difficult to collect. It could get stuck in a lot of machinery that otherwise three-dimensional rigid things pass through with no problem. The U.S. is the largest producer of plastic packaging waste per person and our plastic recycling rate has stayed around 9% since 2012. That's low compared to the EU's plastic recycling rate of 30% and China's 25%. Got my bagel. Oh sh**. Oh no, that's tinfoil. Okay. So the bagel's in tinfoil, which isn't paper, but not plastic. Lunchtime. I've avoided plastic, but I'm using a lot of paper or I go for an aluminum can or a glass bottle. Why are those materials any better than plastic? The thing about plastic and what's really driving this awareness is the litter impacts. If you've purchased something in a paper bag and that ends up as litter, that's going to have a very different fate than a plastic bag ending up in litter. The paper bag is going to biodegrade. It's going to break down. It's not going to stay in the environment for very long. But plastic, what it does is it breaks up into smaller and smaller pieces and then it can be ingested by wildlife or entangle wildlife. Spotted on the street. This is probably not sanitary, but I'm going to pick this up because this is future ocean plastic. Stuff like this gets washed down drains and into the ocean and then it gets eaten by fishies. And another one. You guys, these are everywhere. Definitely going to wash my hands. Goodbye. After cigarette butts, plastic food wrappers, bottles, caps, straws and bags are the top five most found items in beach cleanups. One recent study estimated that 140,000 plastic straws are in New York City's waterways alone. We just went on a shoot. We were filming. I'm so thirsty because I left my reusable water bottle. I can't drink any of them. A million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute. That number is expected to increase by another 20% by 2021. I obviously can't take a coffee-to-go cup, so I've got this nifty reusable cup and I'm going to go get some iced tea inside of it. Americans consume 400 million cups of coffee every day. Even paper coffee cups are lined with plastic so that they can hold hot temperatures, but that means in most cases they can't be recycled. Can I get iced tea? I'm doing no plastic removal. Are you doing it too? Or are you always doing it? Always. Right. Cheers to our reusable containers. I love that. So today to avoid plastic, instead of taking it to code container, I've asked for my lunch to stay and I'm using a real plate and real silverware. What an idea. So why is small pieces of plastic so hard to recycle? Because of their size or how thin they are. A lot of facilities like ours will use a lot of screening mechanisms when they're receiving glass and other things that you want to break up and filter out first. So really small items less than two, two and a half inches will usually kind of be included in what gets filtered out initially, which can make it hard to recover down the line. So that's one of the main reasons why straws or caps can be really challenging for us to recover. So would it be better if you are using a straw or a cap or cutlery to put in the recycling bin or just to put it in the trash? First of all, I would always encourage using less of those kinds of tricky items. So using a durable metal straw that you can bring with you or having your own cutlery, of course. But if you are using a straw, if you are using single-use cutlery in New York City, it's okay to still put in with your plastics. But honestly, in most places, probably a better bet to be just putting it in the trash if it's not getting recovered well. 40 billion plastic utensils are used every year just in the United States. In 2016, France became the first country to announce a total ban on plastic cups, plates and cutlery to go into effect by 2020. Costa Rica has gone further with plans to replace single-use plastics with renewable and compostable alternatives by 2021. The people who continue to use single-use plastics derived from petrol will have to pay a fee or a levy or a fine. And the people who are concerned with the environment who stop using single-use plastics will not have to pay that fee or that levy. So that's an economic disincentive to the use of single-use plastics. It might be true that single-use plastics or the material from which we develop these plastics back or these straws or these coffee removers might be cheaper than something that is done by a renewable source or something that is a compostable source. But it's not really cheaper because when you think about the environmental externality that is attached to that cheapness, there's no economic sense. One of the easiest ways I've realized to cut out plastic is to just say no to the plastic bag. Right now my purse is acting as a bag for my sandwich. Shoppers in the United States use almost one plastic bag per resident per day. Compare that to shoppers in Denmark who on average use only four plastic bags a year. There's 40 countries around the world that have banned, restricted and taxed plastic bags. Here, California is the only state to do so. And it's actually more common for states to ban plastic bag bans than the plastic bags. So far, nine states including Idaho, Arizona, Michigan, Missouri and Florida have done this. I've saved so much money because I really don't get to-go coffee cups, to-go teas. This is only the second one I've gotten all month and that's because I can't use those to-go containers. So definitely one perk is saving money because you're really more thoughtful about what you consume. Remembering our reusables is always my top tip because let's face it, most of us have reusables. Whether it's shopping bags, water bottles, coffee cups. We've got those things already but I always say like they're not reusable if you don't bring them with you. So this is something I'm calling secondhand plastic. Basically, I didn't buy the plastic but I definitely am benefiting from the use of plastic. This happens all the time and just something that's a real reality of this challenge. So this stuff all came in plastic. My sister bought it for me because she's cooking me dinner and I'm still going to eat it because I think it would be wasteful and stupid not to as well as kind of rude. 40% of plastic packaging waste comes from food packaging. Plastic packaging does have some environmental advantages. It can decrease food waste by increasing shelf life. Take cucumbers. It can keep them on the shelves for two weeks rather than three days. But research has also found that the packaging might increase food waste by forcing you to buy more than you need. Some customers have taken the plastic packaging issue to the grocery stores by staging plastic attacks and leaving all of their plastic packaging for the retailer to deal with. Now I'm going to go grocery shopping without using any plastic. I've got these nifty reusable bags. I'm going to fill them up at the bulk bins and make some delicious dinner. I'm lucky that I can go to a store with a bulk food section. Although bulk stores are increasing across the U.S., they're not very common. Some states only have two bulk stores, while others have dozens. This only has a tiny rubber band, so I'm going to take it. I'll wash it really well later. These have little stickers, but I'm going to take them anyway. So I made this whole meal, and this is the only plastic that I used. By 2050, there will be around 12 billion tons of plastic litter in landfills and the environment. By then, the plastics industry could account for 20% of the world's total oil consumption. This trend is not slowing down. In the U.S. alone, producers of the common form of plastic, polyethylene, are expecting to increase production capacity by as much as 75% by 2022. The U.N. estimates the cost of plastic packaging in our environment is $40 billion. The linear economy, in which you just extract something from the soil, you use it for a couple of minutes, and then you have a waste problem, it's no longer valid. It's no longer economically or ecologically or even politically valid. After spending an entire month trying to avoid single-use plastic, I realize how much it's a part of our disposable culture. Experts that I spoke to told me that in order to solve this plastic pollution problem, we have to move toward a circular economy where all of our waste is reusable or recyclable, and where the responsibility of recycling our waste falls not just on the consumer, but also on the manufacturer who creates the plastic in the first place. What is your one small step that you take to avoid single-use plastic? Let us know in the comments and share this if you liked it. See you guys next time.