Failing Miserably at the Plastics Challenge

Growing up, my family had a total of five different garbage bins to collect different kinds of recyclable and non-recyclable trash: Solid waste, organic waste, recyclable packaging material (“the yellow bag”), waste paper and used glass. I grew up in Germany, where recycling your garbage is generally common. Upon first coming to the United States, I was puzzled by the lack of recycling and the extensive use of disposable plastics. When I heard about the extra credit option for this class, I immediately thought that this would not be a problem for me whatsoever. After all, I had grown up in the land of environmental activism, it seemed, (when compared to America). Yes, people used plastics in Germany but at least separating it from other waste and recycling as much as possible was fairly widespread. Surely, this education must have had provided me with enough consciousness about the ubiquity of plastic to ace the challenge with flying colors..

My American contacts packaging is sporting the “green dot.”

But there are no “yellow bags” to properly dispose of it.

I decided to spend a regular day during the week going completely without any throwaway, one-time-use plastics. The previous day I had wondered what there was to prepare but couldn’t think of anything out of the ordinary and went to sleep totally unconcerned. I woke up in the morning, telling myself “this is going to be such a piece of cake.” Instinctively, my hand first moved to the water bottle on my nightstand. I was about to unscrew the top as I remembered that this would be a violation of the rules. Annoyed at this incident, I got up. Still thirsty, I contemplated getting a cup of water from the downstairs kitchen. But that would have required me to go downstairs. Plus, I would have ended up with a non-disposable cup in my room, which then would have to be put back in the dishwasher downstairs. – Nope.

The water looked so refreshing in its evil plastic bottle though!

“Whatever,” I decided and hit the shower instead, moderately grumpy at this point. Upon entering the bathroom, I couldn’t help but notice plastic everywhere… The shower curtains, the shampoo bottles; all things from the window frame to my contact case were plastic. My mood lightened a bit when I realized that my electric toothbrush only requires me to change the head rather than regular toothbrushes which have to be thrown away entirely. Unfortunately, my spirit was crushed when I saw that the Oral-B Pulsonic toothbrush heads come wrapped in unnecessarily thick maximum security plastic packaging, more than 50% of which exists purely for having a list of the same redundant instructions in fourteen different languages on the back.

Step 1: Brush teeth. Step 2: Waste plastic while you’re at it.

Weighed down by the amount of plastics in my life, I walked past the kitchen altogether to avoid further encountering heaps of throwaway plastics and went straight to my car. Unsurprisingly, a pile of disposable plastic was awaiting inside: A Gatorade bottle, a lighter, a tic tac box, and Marlboro Gold cigarettes. I sighed, then I stopped dead in my tracks. It hit me right there: The box of cigarettes. The cigarettes! Not only cigarette boxes contain disposable plastic but also the cigarettes themselves have filters made out of 12,000 plastic-based non-biodegradable fibers, and there is pretty much nothing that meets the definition of “disposable” more than a cigarette butt. Slowly, the first signs of anxiety and dread started creeping up on me in anticipation of a whole smoke-free day. Not only that, but major guilt overcame me at the thought of the past few years.

Plot twist: My bad habit throws me the ultimate curveball.

Had I not been littering, throwing cigarette butts into the streets like they were breadcrumbs at a bird feeding? I sure had. So there I was now: Proud of my home country’s environmental awareness and of my undeniable enthusiasm for recycling and gobsmacked with the realization that I had been contributing very actively yet mostly unwittingly to the immeasurable amounts of “forever trash” littering our world. By the time I had reached campus, I was a stressed out mess. There was a synergy of bad feelings: 1. a looming panic over not being allowed my nicotine fix all day and 2. the guilty conscience over my hypocrisy with respect to littering in the past.

By the end of the first class period, I had begrudgingly admitted to myself that I would probably fail spectacularly at the challenge. And sure enough, a mere hour later, I had caved in to my cravings. Nevertheless, I still learned some very important things from the attempt: An important lesson in humility on the one hand, and a declared intention to consciously watch where I put my cigarette butts in the future on the other.

-- Max Röntgen (23 April 2015)