Plastics Challenge

Sacha Horn
Discussion 310

I knew that trying to live for a day without plastics wasn’t going to be an easy thing to do. The night before I started, I decided to plan out my day so I could use as little plastic as possible. Even doing that, I still wasn’t able to make it all the way through the day.

The morning that it started, my roommate got up for class at the same time as me so I used her alarm clock to wake up so I didn’t have to touch my phone first thing in the morning, which contains a lot of plastic. I had taken a shower the night before so I was able to avoid using shampoo and conditioner bottles in the shower. However, my face wash bottles, hair spray bottle, toothpaste, and toothbrush all have some sort of plastic in them that I was unable to avoid that morning. It was really hard trying to find something to eat that morning since most of the food containers are made out of plastic like the milk bottle, bag of a cereal box, or yogurt container, so I had an apple for breakfast.

The night before I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to go to class and not use plastic because I could just bring along sheets of paper instead of notebooks and use pencils instead of pens. The only problem was the only bag I had that I could take to class was my backpack which has a lot of plastic in the lining and straps. Another thing was my shoes that I wore to class have plastic in the ends of the laces and I couldn’t really get around that.

I was fine the rest of the day until lunch when I realized everything had plastic in it. I decided to just make a sandwich but I had to take the bread out of a plastic bag and the cover of the peanut butter had plastic in it.

In the afternoon I had to use my laptop to do homework which is made of a lot of plastic. I had to use my chemistry book which has plastic in the cover. For dinner, I couldn’t make anything in my house because I would have to use a lot of plastic so I just went to Subway, but I’m sure the paper it was wrapped in had something in it. At night when it got dark, I had my roommates turn on all the lights for me and I used more plastic to do more homework. By the end of the night I was very tired of trying to avoid plastic and was realizing it was impossible. So many of the things I rely on are made of plastic and I can’t avoid using it. These things are so convenient for everyone and change is going to be very difficult.