A Full Day Without Plastics

 A Full Day Without Plastics

by Robert Hazen

I made the decision to go one whole day without plastics, assuming that it would be easy, but I was dead wrong. Everything we use nowadays makes use of plastic—clothing, pens, computers, phones, cars, housewares, food wrappers and much more—that’s only the things we use on a daily basis. My approach was to just stay indoors, but as you can imagine, this is extremely boring. If you want a challenge, trying sitting in a room surrounded by the plastics you unconsciously use on a daily basis. 

To pass the time, I was about to turn on the television and then realized that I could not even do that because the remote and television both contain plastic. Listen to music? Nope—my phone and computer both contain plastic. I thought a brief second at the homework I should do, but decided against that. The thought of being stuck indoors all day was maddening, but from the time I woke up, I managed to eat a somewhat healthy breakfast of eggs—which were the ones from the cardboard container, and water from the tap. By this point, I have managed to go three hours without plastics, and already it was a challenge. 

Finding something to pass the time is difficult, so I began working on my final reports for classes, just pencil and paper. I cannot even remember the last time I wrote a first draft on paper—it feels like an ancient art that has been lost to technology, and I can see why. This process is much slower… Ugh! By the time I finish writing up one essay, I passed another three hours—the time was mainly spent reading books, and looking for sources (again, a longer process than looking online for source information). So all together, six hours have passed. What a waste of a day, especially since it was one of the more decent days we had. But I like giving myself a challenge. That is the whole reason as to why I chose to do the most difficult option.

After getting some of the work done on my first essay, I now move on to the second essay. This one was harder because I needed to use a computer to find sources, but despite that, I began writing down the introduction and developing the ideas as to how I wanted to write the essay. You never realize how important computers are until you cannot use them. And then when you do use them, it is always a love-hate relationship. Another two hours pass, and I am exhausted from writing. Eight whole hours of a day. Only 12 more to go. By this point, I was out of options. I definitely was not going to do more homework, but I could fix lunch—that will knock off another half hour of preparing food: a bowl of soup, with more tap water.

I made it eight and a half hours! This would be a great accomplishment for anyone as it was for me. I guess to kill some more time, I could take a nap, but I was not really tired. Instead, I passed the time by sorting through my rock and copper collection, and better organized them. I could look at rocks all day, but two hours is long enough. By this time, ten and a half hours passed without using any plastics. From 8AM to 6:30PM is a long stretch for anyone.

But unfortunately, I gave in after this. I just had to put shoes on and go outside. There is no way I was going to miss the end of such a beautiful day. If shoes did not have plastics in them, I would have been outside all day long. Unfortunately, I could not complete the 24 hour challenge, but I learned that it was possible, albeit extremely boring, while at the same time being paranoid that something has plastic in it. 

I think this is a challenging task given that everything we use, and depend on, on a daily basis has plastic in it. Plastic is a danger to the environment and the ecosystem, and both the manufacturing and end product contain endocrine disruptors that harms ourselves and the ecosystem. But plastic has made our lives easier—it is a lightweight and durable product and is in everything we use to bring down the costs of other products, like televisions and phones. It is the product that we use to communicate to the world and others. Without plastic, our lives would be comparable to the Amish or the pilgrims. But while this has its benefits for us, the harmful aspects of plastic need to be addressed, and to do so, our next challenge is to find a way to produce and manufacture plastic that does not take away from its quality, but does remove the toxins and endocrine disruptors from the equation.