One person's trash...

Once you decide to deplasticise and boycott future plastic, it's hard to know where to start! The kitchen was the obvious one for me, due to the many reports linking plastics with hormone disruption. Particularly for babies and children.

But if you went and tipped all your plastic in the rubbish, or even sent it to the op shop (opportunity shop, charity shop, thrift store), and then went out and bought a whole lot of flash bamboo and stainless steel, well, that would just be so wasteful, no? Even if you could afford it, that level of dumping is just silly.

But I am slowly getting rid of my plastic. I'm sending it to the op shop, or using it for non-food things around the house. But I have to ask this ethical question, too. Am I dumping plastic on unwitting people who haven't come across the great anti-plastic issue? I guess they would just go and buy it brand new otherwise... Hmmm... it's tricky.

Anyway, deplasticising needn't cost the earth. Some of that swanky eco stuff is just exorbitant. I have a little bit. I have Pyrex, Parfait and Bormioli Rocco for storing food, and also some Fowler's Vacola jars, which are meant to be for canning and preserving. But until I get my act together in the garden, they're for food storage. I think they're equivalent to Mason jars in the States? The Vacola jars were gifted to me by friends and family.

We need a lot of jars because we try to buy unpackaged and in bulk where we can. We're not rich, so we've needed to buy these over time. I also have some old food jars that I reuse, but find many of them are not airtight enough and will let the weevils and little moths in.

This is where op shopping really comes to the fore (a charity shop in England, and a thrift store Stateside).

There is a plethora of non-plastic goodies there from just about every decade last century. The other week we did a family trip to our local op shop. It was mainly baskets we were after. My girls have a lovely tradition of going out to the garden to pick a salad while I cook dinner. They were using some plastic baskets my mum had given me, old ricotta containers, so we got a little basket for each of them, as well as a big salad collecting basket for me.

[Whoops: just realised I left something out. A little ceramic soap dish for the kitchen, such has it been so incorporated into our lives (I'm back to cake soap after expermenting with hand-made liquid soap. Maybe another post on that some time). In any case, the total was $15 so I've obviously overpriced a couple of the above items]:

We stuck to the basket theme, and picked up a little basket for the crayons for the craft table. We found a little stainless steel hors d'oeuvres dish, which is a good kid-sized plate for snacks. Also, two kid-sized sporks, stainless steel and wood.

We had to get the obligatory book, too. Cardboard, but sort of plastic-coated, I think. Well, at least it's re-using.

Now. We also got these little wooden "woven bamboo" salad dishes. Two little ones for the girls, and a "leaf tray set". Do you remember these from the '70s? It wasn't till I got them home, that I started to wonder, how the hell are these made? It's not one carved piece of wood (that would be much more expensive, to be sure). What holds it together? What are they coated with?

Well, I Googled away, but it's very hard to find much information about how they're made or, indeed what they're made from. Some sites say bamboo, others, such as the box in the picture, the very helpful "wood". Great. Probably some terribly unsustainable non-plantation stuff. Oh, well, at least it's second-hand. (Interestingly, the stuff in the box had obviously never been used. Someone didn't like their 5-piece leaf tray set gift and had hidden it in the back of the linen cupboard for 30 years, then dumped it at the op shop. The stuff is really shiny. Never been washed.) So, what causes the shine?

It also surprised me to see that you can still buy this stuff, brand new. But do they give you any information about what it's made from? Or how? No.

Finally, it was a commenter on Amazon who was able to enlighten me as to the coating:

 

When I received my 12" bowl I noticed how shiny it is - so I set about to try to figure out what kind of coating is applied. No product description anywhere mentions it, so I tried calling the manufacturer Winco. The person I got on the phone transferred me to someone who told me that the materials are 93% wood, and melamine and formalin. Wish that were included in the description - I wouldn't have purchased it had I known.

Hmmm, yes. Me either. Those things are going back to the op shop whence they came! They're basically trashy plastic-coated wood trying to look all warm and fuzzy and 1970s. Probably glued together with formaldehyde too. No wonder someone left them in their linen cupboard for 30 years).

Oh, well, you live and learn. We were still pretty chuffed with our other purchases, and didn't think $15 was bad at all. I've also bought egg cups, vases, candle holders. So many things, actually, from the op shop.

Op shopping is really one of the unused, or underused, practices in our western society of consumerism and capitalism. That stuff is just about to go to landfill, so saving it, and reusing it (not sending it to costly and carbon-intensive recycling, let alone landfill) is one of the most important keys to eliminating waste.