Tamar Christensen

REFUSE is my favorite of the R's.  I like the idea of rejecting any and all things that I know will eventually end up in the waste stream. After all, if we don't need it perhaps we will never make it, all of which would help reduce emissions through drilling, mining, logging, transportation, production, recycling, and landfill off-gassing.

Every single morning I refuse single-use tea bags and/or coffee cups. I buy my tea loose from the bulk spice aisle at Sprouts in a plastic baggie I've been washing and reusing for a number of years now (it's only single-use if you use it ONCE).  In doing so, I am refusing new plastics AND reducing my waste. 

I used to be like most Americans, using straws, cups, bottles, food containers, bags, razors; almost all of which were made from single-use plastic. I really enjoyed reading about how plastic doesn't break down in our environment and, in particular, the problems that come with bio-plastics. When I think about the lifecycle of a plastic item (e.g. what resources it took to extract the oil from the earth, the pollution extraction causes, the transportation and refinement of the oil, both of which add further greenhouse gases to our atmosphere while also polluting our land and water, the many people who work in this dangerous and unhealthy field whose health is affected as a result, then the factories that transform these refined petrochemicals into plastics that contribute additional pollution via their production of plastics, and finally the end of the life of the plastic item where it heads to our ocean to break up into small pieces where it will be consumed by marine life and then by people or it heads to our landfills to break up and pollute our ground water in the process, but not before perhaps harming wildlife on land or in the sea or, perhaps worse still, that plastic waste is shipped off to developing countries where it pollutes their air, water, and land causing myriad health problems), I realize that the convenience of a plastic fork to eat my delivery food is only convenient for me in the short term, and certainly isn't convenient for any of the people affected by any single point in the production line of plastics that I outlined above.

I especially enjoyed reading the "100 Tips to Get to Zero" because the task of even AIMING for zero waste seemed an impossible feat once I could clearly see how plastics permeated my life.  I wrote out a list of items I wanted to work on and put them on my fridge, focusing on only one task at a time to create a new behavioral pattern.  I started this back in 2016 and very quickly reduced what I sent to the landfill by about 75%, much of which was plastics. I'm posting a photo here from my Instagram account: @vintage_is_eco when I first tried out Plastic Free July. 

These days, my home is predominantly zero waste because all of those changes became my new HABITS. I buy my shampoo, sunscreen, body lotion, tea, pantry items like beans/nuts/oats/flour/sugar, toothpaste, cleaning products, laundry detergent and so much more from the bulk aisles at Sprouts, Northgate Market, or zero waste shops like BYO Long Beach or Refillery LA. And I've learned to use less of concentrated products so I what seems like a higher expense at times isn't all that different than what I was paying before for conventional items in disposable packaging.

When I buy in bulk, I skip the plastic bags and use cotton produce bags instead, which you can now buy cheaply at Sprouts near the bulk aisle. For liquids, where I'd have bought toothpaste in plastic tubes, I now reuse old glass bottles and jars (mustard jars are my favorite for tooth tabs bc they're just so pretty). I reuse larger jars like spaghetti or peanut butter jars for body lotion and shampoo.