Beyond the Basics for Reducing Plastic

Last week, we talked a little about how to reduce plastic consumption. Now, if you follow the suggestions from last week, you'll probably be able to cut your plastic consumption in half. But for those of you that want to go a little further and cut your plastic consumption down even further, here are a few slightly more hardcore tips to reducing plastic consumption.

Reduce the waste of plastic to go containers by bringing your own tupperware when you go out to eat. Sure, the containers they give you might not be plastic. But they might be. And they're definitely disposable.

Stop using straws. This one is not so hardcore, as it is just easy to forget to ask wait staff not to put a straw in your drink. Probably you can just drink straw free, but if you don't want to do that, you can keep a glass straw in your purse. (I'm told that they really don't break.) Personally, I can never remember to ask for no straw, but I bet you can do better.

Other ways to reduce plastic consumption: make your own mayonnaise, bread, yogurt, etc. Again, I admit that I am not yet able to do all this on my own. So, instead, as I mentioned earlier, I save bread bags for produce and I save yogurt containers as tupperware. And I don't eat mayonnaise.

One last word of advice as the plastic themed posts come to a close: don't feel like you need to rid yourself of all plastic in a day. Give yourself the time and space to slowly cut plastic from your life. The water bottles and the plastic grocery bags can go today. But, you can build up to the point where you bring your own straw in to restaurants. Changes take time, and if you try to do everything at once, you are likely to just burn out.

And with that, good luck living plastic lite!!

For more resources on plastic, check out the website Fake Plastic Fish.