by Beth Terry
Returning from Earth Resource Foundation’s “No Plastic Left Behind” conference this weekend, it occurs to me that Fake Plastic Fish is lonely. Look at her swimming by herself in a big polluted fish pond. In the beginning, the only other plastic-free bloggers she knew of were Plasticless.com and Vancouver’s Plastic-Free in 2007. But that gal hasn’t posted since January. (Where are you EnviroWoman?) Then along came other similar souls: Life Less Plastic swimming in Chicago, the Biscuit Queen in New York, Polythene Pam in the U.K. and recently Plastic Is Forever, two gals in New York and L.A. But the plastic-free world needs more voices!
Why?
Because living a plastic-free life depends on what’s available where you live. What I realized after attending the conference in Orange County, CA is that I am very, very lucky to live in the SF Bay Area where natural food stores with their big bulk bins are abundant. I can bring my cloth bags to Berkeley Bowl or Whole Foods or Rainbow Grocery or other places in my area and fill up with all types of flour, pasta, beans, cereals, grains, and even baking soda (one of my personal care and cleaning items of choice) without taking home any packaging, plastic or otherwise, at all. But not everyone has these kinds of resources.
So I think we need more plastic-free and lower-plastic voices in the blogosphere. More people living their lives attempting to go plastic-free and blogging about the challenges that they face. And we need more bloggers writing to companies about their packaging and publicizing the responses. We need teenage bloggers writing about the plastic challenges at their schools (I only just learned this weekend that schools are serving lunches on Styrofoam trays. WTF? In my day we had durable trays that got washed and reused.) And we need more parents blogging about solutions for plastic-free child-rearing.
There are hundreds of green bloggers popping up every day. Just check out Best Green Blogs if you don’t believe me. And while it’s great that so many bloggers are focusing on environmental issues, the truth is that few of them concentrate primarily on plastic. And plastic is a big problem.
So, here are the steps:
1) Start giving up plastic. Go slow. Make one change at a time. Don’t feel you have to be as hard core as Fake Plastic Fish. Few people in this world are as obsessive compulsive as I am, and that’s probably a good thing! Polythene Pam, for example, eliminates one type of plastic item per month. Do what is reasonable for you.
2) Set up your blog. With Blogger.com, you can do it in minutes.
3) Write about how you are going plastic-free. Let us know your successes as well as your failures. Tell us about what companies you think are helpful and rat out those that are not. It’s your blog. You can write what you want. The main thing is to write at least one post per week. We want to hear you, but we don’t want you to be so over-loaded with blogging that you don’t have time to live.
4) Let others know about your blog. Contact me, and I’ll link to you. Email other green and plastic-free bloggers and ask them to link to you. This is the way to make your voice heard. I couldn’t have reached as many readers as I have without the help of bloggers like No Impact Man, Crunchy Chicken, Green L.A. Girl, and others who came before me.
5) Spread the word about your blog to friends and relatives. There are many, many people out there who don’t care about the blogosphere. But they’ll read your blog because they know you. Let’s get our voices out of the the echo chamber and into the streets. Or something like that.
Let’s create a world without plastic pollution, one blog at a time, one voice at a time.
What do you say???
