Emelia

My Personal Challenge Plan

Image via vinsensiusagung/Shutterstock

List:

· A scale (only thing I don’t have)

· PET bottle

· Scissors

· drumstick/stiff implement

I will know if my personal challenge has been successful if by the end of the challenge my plastic use has decreased by thirty percent (i.e. my last ecobrick weighs thirty percent less than my first one). One challenge I foresee is differentiating the plastic that I will put into the brick versus what I should recycle. I know there are many different plastics and only some are recyclable, and I’m not sure if recycling is more eco-friendly than ecobricking. In addition to this, some things (like plastic grocery bags) I save to reuse, so it will be challenging to decide what I should and should not include.

I selected the product consumption challenge group. I chose this group because I consume too much plastic and confronting that during this class will help me pave the way to live a more sustainable future. This summer I studied abroad in Belize, while there I saw so much plastic pollution and we even tried to clean a beach. It was incredibly eye-opening, especially when we were cleaning up the beach, so much plastic would shatter as you picked it up. It was so difficult to clean thoroughly, and really made me reevaluate my consumption habits.

My goal is to reduce my weekly plastic waste by 30%, but I hope to get closer to 50%. I am aiming for thirty percent because research shows that about 50% of the plastic consumed is discarded after one use (Xanthos & Walker, 2017). I will accomplish my goal by being more aware of what I consume and making conscious efforts to invest in reusable alternatives. To measure my plastic consumption I plan on creating what is known as an ecobrick.

An ecobrick is a PET bottle packed tightly with plastic, in the hopes of removing said plastic from the landfill cycle and prevent it from ending up in waterways. Ecobricks can be effectives ways of keeping plastic detritus and toxins out of ecosystems, while supplying the brick-er with a usable building material (Global Ecobrick Alliance). First, I will complete a control week where I do not change my habits, and I will ecobrick all the non-recyclable plastic I use. At the end of the week I will weigh the ecobrick to determine how much plastic I consumed. From then on, I will continue to ecobrick while monitoring and changing my consumption habits, weighing the brick(s) weekly. I will record the weekly weight in an excel spreadsheet and take photos to document my progress.

Image via onemillionwomen.com/au
The progress on my first eco-brick as of 10/17

Challenges

I have found that the act of washing and drying my plastics (necessary for eco-bricking) is more time-consuming than I anticipated. To mitigate this, I will make a pile of my plastics throughout the day and set aside time every couple days to wash and dry the plastic I have accumulated.

Blog Post 1

I started my personal challenge on 10/16, the following week will act as my null measurement. That is to say, I have not yet changed any of my consumption habits. I will be collecting my plastics without changing my consumption habits until 10/25, after which I will alter my consumption habits.

I have started by separating the plastics I would normally discard into three categories:

  1. recyclable

  • Type 1 plastics - PET

  • Type 2 plastics - HPDE

  • Most widely recycled and accepted plastics (Plastics for Change, 2021).

  1. eco-brick plastics

  • All not type 1&2 plastics

  • Able to be cut, crushed, or shoved into my brick receptacle

  1. other

  • Non-recyclable plastics that cannot be crushed, cut, or shoved into my brick receptacle

Link to biodiversity crisis?


In order to more closely connect my project with biodiversity, I will use the total difference in weight between my null weeks and following weeks and calculate the reduction in my carbon footprint. I will break down the calculation by amount of carbon dioxide emissions that are released through manufacturing plastic, up to 3 pounds of CO2 per pound of plastic (Blue, 2018). In addition to this, I will calculate the CO2 emissions I avoided by recycling or eco-bricking my plastics instead of discarding them, as incinerating 1kg of plastic releases about 2.9 kg of CO2 (Center for International Environmental Law, 2021).

Challenges

I have found that the act of washing and drying my plastics (necessary for eco-bricking) is more time-consuming than I anticipated. To mitigate this, I will make a pile of my plastics throughout the day and set aside time every couple days to wash and dry the plastic I have accumulated.

Blog Post 2

Timeline

This past week (10/16 to 10/23) has been my null week, where I collected all my plastics and ecobricked them, but have not yet altered my consumption. From this point on I will actively try to reduce my plastic waste by upwards of 30%.


Reflection

First, I was SHOCKED at how much plastic I consume. Plastic is so pervasive and easy to forget about if you don’t look for it, there were several times when I had to dig through the trash or recycling to find plastic I mistakenly discarded. The visual ratio of non-recyclable plastics to recyclable plastics I consume is very disheartening, and pushes me to do better in my consumption habits this upcoming week.


Challenges

I found that washing most of my plastics on Friday and laying them out to dry worked well for me. A new challenge I encountered was my lack of a storage system, I tended to have piles of plastics scattered throughout my apartment. Remembering to store the plastics I consume outside of the apartment, like the wrappers to the candy Joe brought in last week, has also proven to be a challenge.

To address these challenges and the times I had to dig through the trash to retrieve plastics I threw away, I want to create a system wherein I divide my plastics by type and by status (washed vs unwashed). I will do this by putting three boxes on my kitchen counter, each containing a shopping bag (already possess). Each box will serve to hold a category of plastics, and the bag will hold unwashed plastics. For outside my apartment, I’ll have two shopping bags in my backpack, one for unwashed plastics and another for washed plastics, to separate at home.

Quantifying my Impact

I have not weighed my plastics to calculate my null values, as the scales have yet to arrive. As an alternative, I calculated the carbon footprint of some of the distinct plastics I consumed. I used the online plastic carbon footprint calculator from cleanhub.com to estimate the pounds of ocean-bound plastic I have already consumed in a week via container type (bottle, tube, tub). I consumed two water bottles and one lotion tube in the past week, amounting to 0.05 pounds of ocean-bound plastic (CleanHub, n.d.). From this, I calculated how many pounds of CO2 were emitted during the plastic manufacturing process, and how many would be emitted if they were incinerated to get the amount of CO2 I have already 'saved'.

0.05 lbs * 3 lbs CO2 emitted manufacturing

= 0.15 lbs CO2 ALREADY EMITTED


2.9 kg * 2.20462 lbs/1kg

= 6.39341 lbs CO2/lb plastic incinerated


0.05 lbs * 6.39341 lbs CO2

= 0.32 lbs CO2 SAVED


0.32lbs saved - 0.15 lbs emitted

=0.17 lbs saved (subsample of plastics)

Image 1: Week 1 ecobrick

Image 2: Week 1 recyclable plastics

Image 3: Week 1 nonrecyclable non-ecobrick plastic, a single lotion bottle cap.
Image 4: Plastic carbon footprint calculator via https://www.cleanhub.com/plastic-footprint-calculator
Image 5: Some of my plastics laying out to dry

Blog Post 3

This past week (10/23-10/30) was my first week of altering my behavior to reduce my plastic consumption.

Table 1: This table breaks down my plastic consumption by type and week, units are grams.
Table 2: This table breaks down my net CO2 emissions saved through ecobricking and recycling in kilograms.

Calculations + Totals

I received my scale and was able to measure my week 1 plastic consumption (given in grams). To ensure I was only accounting for the net plastic I consumed, I deducted the weight of my brick apparatus, which is 40 g, and a ziplock bag I use to measure my recyclables (10 g). During my null week I consumed 165 g of plastic (table 1). During week 2 I found that I couldn’t fit some stiffer plastics into my ecobrick, so I started a second ecobrick. This past week I consumed 140 grams of plastic (table 1). This is only a reduction of 15%, which is half of my goal.

I used the weights to estimate how much carbon was used during manufacturing of the plastics, and how much carbon would be used to incinerate these plastics to estimate the CO2 emissions I’m saving by ecobricking or recycling plastics. I converted the rate that Blue (2018) gave for into kilograms for consistency, getting 1.36 kg of CO2 per 1 kg manufacturing plastic. I also converted my weight values into kilograms. From there, I found that over two weeks I have saved about 0.471 kilograms of CO2 emissions via ecobricking and recycling (table 2).


Reflection + Future

I did reduce my overall plastic consumption, but not as much as I had hoped. I have noticed that the vast majority of plastics I consume are from food. Moving forward I will lessen my plastic consumption by cooking more frequently and preparing lunches for when I am out and about. I think that my plastic consumption is particularly high this month due to the nature of Halloween festivities, as my family always gifts me large bags of individually wrapped candies and plastic-wrapped Halloween decorations. It has been sobering to see how much waste I generate while celebrating my favorite holiday. For the upcoming Christmas holidays I will urge my family to take alternative routes of celebration. We can bake cookies instead of buying packaged sweets, and we can make decorations out of evergreens and birch wood instead of buying new decorations

Image 1-4: My two ecobricks and the weighing process

Final Report


Introduction

My personal challenge involved reducing my consumption of plastic. Plastic is an exceptionally pervasive material with global plastic manufacturing totaling over 460 million tonnes (Ritchie & Roser 2018). This presents a threat to biodiversity due to the high levels of carbon dioxide emitted through manufacturing or incinerating plastic. In addition, ingestion of plastic by wildlife leads to starvation, disease, and mortality. Plastic absorbs chemical and organic pollutants, leading to increased toxin concentrations causing death and disease (Prata et al. 2019). My goal this past month was to reduce my plastic consumption by 30%.

Methods

I chose 30% because about half of the plastic consumed globally is discarded after a single use (Xanthos & Walker 2017). I documented my challenge by ecobricking my plastics and taking the weight of the ecobrick at the end of each week. I broke down my consumed plastics into three categories: ecobricked plastic, recyclables (plastic types 1 & 2), and other (nonrecyclables that didn’t fit in the ecobrick). Each ecobricked plastic was washed and dried before being put into the bottle. Week 1 acted as my null week and baseline, I didn’t change my consumptive habits. Weeks 2 and 3 I altered my habits to reduce my consumption. I logged the weights into an excel spreadsheet, and calculated the carbon dioxide emissions of the plastics through manufacturing (3lbs CO2/1lb plastic) and incinerating (2.9kg CO2/1kg plastic) (Blue 2018, Center for International Environmental Law 2021).

Results

Unfortunately, I did not achieve my 30% reduction goal. During my null week I consumed 165 grams of plastic. I consumed another 140 grams my second week, which is a reduction of 15% compared to the null. My third week I consumed 125 grams of plastic, which is a reduction of 24% compared to the null. Over the course of three weeks I saved 0.634 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions through ecobricking and recycling my plastics instead of discarding them to be incinerated. A breakdown of my plastic consumption and carbon dioxide emissions can be found in Tables 1 & 2 and Graphs 1 & 2.

Discussion

I did not manage to reduce my plastic consumption by 30%, though I did get close (24%). I think that this may be due to the timing of my challenge, taking place in the month of October during a time of peak consumerism. In addition to this, on my last week I caught a nasty cold which hampered my motivation to alter my consumptive habits and led to extra plastic waste through at-home COVID tests, medicines, and cough drops. Perhaps with another week I could have achieved 30%. This experience has opened my eyes to how much plastic I consume without thinking on a day-to-day basis, and how difficult it is to avoid altogether. I have come away from this experience with an appreciation for my larger carbon footprint, and I plan to continue ecobricking.

Figures and Images

Graph 1: This graph breaks down my plastic consumption by category and week in grams.
Graph 2: This graph shows consumption by week in terms of percentage of the null.
Table 1: This table breaks down my plastic consumption by type and week.
Table 2: This table breaks down my net CO2 emissions saved through ecobricking and recycling.
Image 1: My final 2 ecobricks.
Image 2: Weighing my Week 3 'other' plastics.
Image 3: Weighing my Week 3 recylables.

Concluding Essay


I am in the product consumption group with a personal goal of reducing my plastic consumption. Within my group three other people are looking at plastic waste, but only two of them (Grace and Sam) altered consumption habits to reduce plastic waste. We all ran into challenges with the almost inescapable use of plastic in food products from takeout containers to plastic wrap on mushrooms. We all aimed to reduce our consumption but went about different ways to do so: I weighed my plastics, Grace categorized all her plastics, and Sam substituted what she would normally buy with a non-plastic alternative. We found that the convenience of food wrapped or contained in plastic was a hard thing to avoid.

This experience has shown me how deeply entrenched American society is into plastic use and convenience, and how we need a fundamental lifestyle change to solve the biodiversity and climate crises. It also exhibited how difficult it can be to make those lifestyle changes, as I didn’t even make my goal of a 30% reduction in plastic consumption. This experience also showed me how it can be difficult to avoid plastic while still shopping affordably. It opened my eyes to how wealth inequality and the cycle of poverty can further fuel our climate crisis. Our current biodiversity and climate crisis is also a crisis of inequity and resource access.

I think that there are two primary ways to reduce plastic use and consumption, one focused mainly on consumers and consumption habits, and another on production and access to resources. Solutions aimed more at consumers could include promoting meal prepping (to reduce shopping trips), promoting growing some food at home, or shopping at local farmer’s markets. Solutions aimed at producers can take the form of more regulations that make plastic-free products cheaper than plastic alternatives, taxing manufacturers for carbon dioxide emissions and pollution related to production, and giving producers incentives to make ‘greener’ products.

I think that targeting producers would be the more effective solution but would be more challenging to implement due to lobbying and government rigamarole. While the consumer solutions are more viable to enact, there are many socioeconomic barriers present that inhibit much of the population from adopting more eco-friendly consumption habits. Consciously consuming less plastic takes time and money, which many people don’t have enough of. I think that for either solution to really work at solving the climate crises we need an overhaul of most governments and organizations, and everybody needs to prioritize the health of the planet. Without a healthy, functional biosphere humans will be unable to survive and innovate. We need an international shift in our moral foundation, and adopt a ‘one health’ view that puts human and ecosystem health and wellbeing over economic gain. I think that only by facing the reality of our dire situation can we start to enact effective solutions.

Sources