Here are some places microplastics have been found: human breastmilk and human semen. Antarctic penguins and the lungs of wild birds in Japan. Fresh fruit and vegetables. Bottled water. Clouds.
The world creates around 450 million tonnes of new plastic each year, about half of which is designed to be used for moments before being thrown away. Less than 10 per cent of it is recycled. Which got me thinking: how hard would it be to avoid using any single-use plastic for a week? Couldn’t I just opt out of the entire thing?
Preparation
I’ve long been a bit of a hippie. I’ve got a soft spot for patchouli and natural fibres, and a reflexive dislike of waste. I use beeswax wraps instead of cling wrap, refuse to use plastic produce bags in supermarkets, and avoided plastic shopping bags even before packaging companies skirted the ban on single-use by making them thicker and rebranding them as “reusable”.
This should be a breeze, I think. It’s not like I’m trying to replicate A.J. Jacobs’ experiment for The New York Times, when he tried to go without even touching plastic for an entire day; going so far as to take a wooden chair onto the subway, and handwriting his observations by candlelight.
To prepare for my week without single-use plastic, I head to Ceres, a sprawling environmental hub in Melbourne’s inner north.
I stock up on “tooth powder” in a glass jar ($20.95) and a toothbrush ($4.95), a shampoo bar ($13.95), conditioning bar ($20.95), and soap ($7.50). Despite my editor’s weird insistence on me using a hog-bristle toothbrush for the week, I can find no such thing. The bamboo toothbrush comes with plastic bristles, and so I’ve failed before I’ve even begun.
Plastic isn’t just ubiquitous, it’s cheap. My haul costs $68, more than double what you’d expect to pay for equivalent mass-produced products encased in single-use plastics.
Day one
The tooth powder is awful.
The cream-coloured powder contains various clays and salts, and ingredients like lime, clove, lemon myrtle, pepper berry and liquorice.
Its cardboard packaging promises I’ll be able to brush my teeth 200 times with the powder, saving 2.5 plastic toothpaste tubes from landfill. (It also promises to “detox” my breath and support my brain function; promises strangely lacking any scientific evidence.)
Using the powder is a disconcerting experience. I wet my toothbrush as directed, and dunk it into the powder. The salty and pungent powder adheres to the toothbrush and quickly turns to clay in my mouth. The flavour makes me gag and, when I spit out the paste to rinse, the whole mess has turned into a greyish-green mush. The prospect of doing this a further 199 times does not appeal.
Later, my daughter and I head to the Queen Victoria Market to shop for fruit and veg. I’m smug in the knowledge my cloth bags and metal “nanna cart”, as she calls it, will make skipping the ubiquitous plastic packaging found in supermarkets a breeze.
We load up on fresh produce, and then – to her eternal mortification – I take my clean glass containers to the deli section, where store holders obligingly fill them without batting an eyelid. Maybe more people do this than I’d realised.
So far, by avoiding supermarkets and planning ahead, avoiding single-use plastic has been a breeze. But the day is not yet out.
A friend comes over to deliver a beautiful, handmade recycled timber loft bed he’s passing on to my son. There’s only one problem.
While my son had been sleeping on a double bed, this bunk has only space for a single mattress. I head over to a big box shop to pick up a new one, chosen both for the softness of the mattress, and also because it comes packaged in a cardboard box.
Opening it at home, I discover the thing is wrapped in metres upon metres of thick plastic packaging. It’s more plastic than I would bring home from a supermarket in weeks.
Day two
I have better luck with the shampoo, conditioner and soap bars, which are straightforward to use and lend the sweet and familiar scent of patchouli and rose.
But then it’s time to walk the dog. This throws up a serious ethical and moral conundrum. Do I take the usual single-use biodegradable bags (which are designed to break down in landfill but still contain plastic) to pick up her droppings? Or do I follow A.J. Jacobs’ lead and bring along a metal spoon? Even by the standards of the inner north, this would mark me as a certified weirdo.
I often wonder – as I’m getting yanked along on a walk by our highly strung dog – what generations to come will make of us when they start excavating all the billions of bags of dog poop we have so carefully interred in plastic. Will they think we were trying to preserve it?
Either way, my conundrum is resolved when, as I’m walking the dog with a metal spoon secreted up the sleeve of my jumper, she poops on a nature strip while there’s no one in sight. We run for it.
Day three
The whole family is on board with the no-new plastic challenge. Tooth powder now coats our bathroom, and whenever one of the kids spills water onto the cabinetry, grey clay patches form. Unable to find glass bottles of milk, we’ve switched to milk cartons. They probably contain small amounts of plastic, but it’s the best I can find.
I’m failing in small but frustrating ways, despite the fact single-use plastic is living rent-free in my head (it’s probably in my brain for real, according to a 2024 US study that showed microplastics comprised about 0.5 per cent of the weight of an average brain).
The most irritating single-use plastic, my editor and I agree, are the fruit stickers we both so detest. It’s only as I peel a sticker off my Nashi pear – smugly bought at the market on day one– that I realise they’ve cost me failure number three.
Later, I absent-mindedly make myself a cup of peppermint tea in the tearoom at work before realising the wrapper probably contains plastic. Then again, my teabag most likely does too. This experiment – meant to be inspiring – is getting depressing.
Day four
Our bathroom sink is blocked. On closer inspection, it’s gunked up with clay from the tooth powder. Just when I thought I couldn’t dislike this stuff more.
I get an email from a PR agent in the United States offering a “story” about a product called Sifts, which supposedly rids the body of microplastics. According to the upbeat press release, Sifts supports a “bind and pass” process to eliminate the body of microplastics. That is, Sifts gives you the … You get the idea.
Finding plastic-free milk and bread has been a challenge, particularly at my local supermarkets where it’s impossible to buy bread that’s not packaged in plastic. Happily, an overdue Google search reveals a nearby wholefoods retailer sells milk in reusable glass bottles, fresh bread in paper bags, and myriad other products without packaging.
Wholefoods Unwrapped Collective, run by Gabrielle Pestinger, was born “from a place of personal frustration”, she tells me, at the height of COVID lockdowns in 2020.
Finding herself at home with lots of time to think, and frustrated at the incessant packing creeping into their house, Pestinger started with tofu. Like bread, plastic-free tofu is just about impossible to buy at supermarkets. So Pestinger convinced a supplier across town to sell her some bulk tofu orders, and packed them into her own reusable containers. Then, when restrictions allowed, Pestinger upped her order and sold plastic-free tofu from her driveway.
Soon, she had 40 people lining up for tofu. Six years later, Pestinger runs an entirely plastic-free retail store selling some 400 products to people who bring their own containers, or borrow one from the shop.
When she goes into a supermarket now, Pestinger tells me, “I feel rushed, frazzled and hit by a sense of sensory overload. The fluorescent lights, the mass of products, and the pressure of ‘fast shopping’ feels purely transactional and clinical.”
Beyond the physical environment, she feels “a profound sense of doom regarding the lack of response from huge supermarket corporations to the climate emergency we are facing”.
“Fruit and vegetable wrapped in soft plastic feels like a deliberate design flaw – a visible symbol of a rigid system that refuses to pivot, even as the need for change becomes undeniable.”
Days five to seven
The next few days pass with little incident. I unblock the bathroom sink, and it soon blocks again. The kids are now banned from spitting softened clay into the basin, and told to spit it into the bin or outside. I’ve reverted to my usual toothpaste.
Very little plastic is coming into the house now, and everyone is consciously thinking about their consumption, which is positive. We’re shopping at markets and small businesses. My daughter is walking the dog, armed with compostable bags (although even these have some plastic components).
Despite all this, our house is still filled with plastic – in our clothes, in the bathroom and in the kitchen. Ridding ourselves of plastic is going to take time.
I keep thinking about the needs-creation that has propelled the sheer volume of single-use plastic into our lives over the past few decades. Two decades ago, I could buy two or three celery sticks at Woolworths. Today, it’s just about impossible to buy celery, cabbages and other vegetables – especially organic – without plastic wrapping in any major supermarket.
None of us asked for plastic stickers on our fruit, or for vegetables to come into our homes covered in as many as three layers of plastic that will shed microplastics for hundreds of years.
Australian Marine Conservation Society plastics campaigner Cip Hamilton says we’re living in a system built around increasing plastic production.
“From plastic-free fruit and veg costing more at the big supermarkets, to microplastics piling up on our favourite beaches, we’re all experiencing the impacts of plastic overproduction,” she says.
“Disposable plastic is being pushed into nearly every corner of our lives, and it’s almost impossible to avoid. Too often, plastic-free choices are being taken away from us.”
Where do we go now?
Last month, Australia’s state, territory and federal environment ministers met to discuss a proposed levy on packaging, and penalties for packaging producers that fail to recycle.
Despite former environment minister Tanya Plibersek first promising in 2023 to implement an overhaul of packaging regulation to force the industry to factor waste reduction into its supply chains, no agreement has been reached.
After trying to go for a week without consuming single-use plastics, one thing has become clear to me: you definitely can’t do it by shopping at major supermarkets.
But as the queues outside Pestinger’s home during 2020 showed, more people are opting to subvert the plastics crisis that has developed in recent decades.
Customer Carol, who prefers not to use her last name, points out that our lifestyle is often driven by our habits.
“So if people can see a personal advantage in not using plastic they are more likely to change a habit,” she says.
“I believe the desire and awareness of the benefits of a reduced plastic environment is growing because people can see the everyday evidence of the environmental impact of single-use packaging.”
Just make sure you don’t underestimate the power of tooth powder. Our sink is blocked again.
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