Brandon Clementi - 312

Throughout my life I've allowed myself to get into a fair amount of rituals. These rituals (such as waking up to my alarm clock, checking my email at least five times a day, and spending hours a day listening to music) dictate my daily actions to the degree that I was almost positive I could not go through an entire day without electronics, much less plastics.

Then it occurred to me: over Thanksgiving Break I would be making a trip with my family to spend time at my grandparent's cabin on Green Lake for a few days. A few distinguishing features about this cabin:

- family bonding to the max
- plenty of good food
- NO TELEVISION
- NO COMPUTERS

Forced separation from the internet!! That was one huge weight I'd have off my back. If there was any day I could succeed in the plastics challenge, it'd be a full day spent at Green Lake. On the night before, I turned off my phone and stashed it in my backpack. I'm certain my phone has never been off so long in its 2 years of service, and doubt it ever will be again.


I awoke late after sleeping on a sort of uncomfortable couch that I'm pretty sure contains no plastic. It's sort of an heirloom (one of my great-grandparents was an upholsterer) from the pre-plastic era. Let me say, this couch is great for napping, but I would have preferred a nice bed.

My first plastic run-ins of the day: hand-pump liquid soap container, toothpaste tube, and water faucet. I deemed these necessary to my day and took one for the team, although i did pass on the toothbrush in favor of the toothpaste-on-the-finger brush. Pretty goofy.

I checked the kitchen cabinets for plastic-free cutlery and found ceramic bowls and small ceramic plates, but no big plastic-free plates. This would be a problem later, but not for now: it was already lunch time (hey, it was break. can you blame me?) and I picked food out that had been set out on the counter for the 'lunch crowd'. Second wave of plastic run ins: plastic food/drink containers. This was virtually impossible to avoid for most parts of the day. Still, I limited it to things that had already been set out so I didn't have to open the refrigerator (shudder).

I had quite a bit of reading to do over break, so I spent a few hours chipping away at this homework. Hey, no plastic in that, right? Wrong.



The whole time I spent reading, I had plastic binding staring me in the face. How unnerving!

I passed up a car trip into town to get groceries, but I decided to help my family with food preparations for our Saturday Thanksgiving. This involved a bit of using plastic-handled knives, pots, and spoons. I also did the dishes (mostly plastic, of course) using a plastic brush and liquid soap from a plastic bottle. Sigh...

When dinner came around, I passed on using a paper plate and went for the plastic. No sense in making garbage when I'd already lost the challenge...

My final plastic encounter came when some of my cousins went on a walk. I wanted to join them, so I donned:

1. shoes with plastic aglets
2. a winter coat made mostly of plastic in varying forms
3. nylon gloves

Upon returning home, I was able to spend the rest of the day without using any plastics I hadn't already used. Overall, I feel I did pretty good. Giving up my use of plastics helped me be especially productive with my reading. It also gave me more of a reason to spend time talking with my relatives (this is the idea behind the no tv/no computer rule my grandparents came up with).

It was a rare day where I didn't need to go anywhere or wake up at a certain time. I didn't need to check my emails for work because it was during a holiday break and I was able to share food preparation tasks with many other people, which reduced my need to do plastic-assisted tasks. On any other day I would have had a much harder time trying to live without the plastics that make up huge chunks of our fast-paced world today.