The plastic boycott: for a sustainable lifestyle

As many of you know, last week was the week of the plastic boycott in Spain (I honestly don’t know if it was done in other European countries or in the world). This idea was born from the Facebok group Zero Waste Spain and invites everyone to avoid buying packaged products for a week. Easy, right? Well, yes and no. During that week, I had thought about writing about the importance of not buying products in disposable containers, or how only 9% of plastic is recycled and the rest is either incinerated or ends up forgotten.

These statistics are alarming, but reminding them to you does’nt reflect the importance of making a change in our way of thinking and more importantly in the way we shop. If you have followed the Valexico blog and its social media (or even if you know me) you know that I’ve always given great importance to the issue of sustainability and the environment long before it became a matter of absolute urgency, but I am not an expert. There are still many habits I need to change and some others I honestly can’t give up, like eating meat (I don’t eat it as often as I used to, but a taquito once in a while doesn’t hurt anyone). That’s why I want to share with you my experience of buying without plastic, a practice that I’ve been trying to do for some months now, but I took it more seriously this week and will continue to do so until it’s completely eliminated from my life.

My week of plastic boycott and the road to a sustainable lifestyle

As I told you before, for some time now I’ve changed my habits to achieve a sustainable lifestyle. I have become much more aware of what I use, what I buy, who I buy from and the social and environmental impact of those purchases. For many years I have separated my waste so that it can be recycled, annoying more tan one person when I asked them to place their waste in the appropriate container. When the videos of the turtle with a straw came out, I thought I didn’t have much to worry about because I didn’t use straws. Then came the videos of the seas and beaches full of plastic containers and there I felt very guilty. Everything, or at least almost everything, that I bought came in a plastic container.

That’s when everything changed. I looked around and there wasn’t a single corner of my house where there wasn’t any plastic; and the food, we’d better not even talk. about it. The convenience of buying processed foods or packaged in plastic is the best solution for someone like me who has zero culinary skills and thinking about cooking something from scratch was an idea from another planet, well no, from another galaxy! This realization came last year, but the real change started this one. I started to buy more at the market or if I had to shop in a supermarket I didn’t use plastic bags for fruit or vegetables, instead I stuck the stickers on my cloth bag to the amussement of the clerks. I stopped buying sliced cheese and started going to the delicatessen and butcher’s (which still have plastic but less). The processed food have dissapeared little by little from my fridge and my pantry already has a lot of bulk food.

With these small changes, I felt safe and confident that the week of the plastic boycott would be a piece of cake. And there was my first mistake. I started the week by going to a bulk store to make my first (and mistakenly thought it was ging to be the only one) purchase of the week. I took some grains, tea and some pasta. I felt happy and proud. From there I went to the Mercado Central to buy the fruit and vegetables of the week and I already felt as a winner by not to using plastic and that if people saw me I would become their idol. So far so good. I came home and put the shopping away, smiling at the glass containers (mostly recycled) in my cupboard.

On Tuesday there was nothing new, but on Wednesday I decided to place an order at Too good to go, save a little money and avoid wasting food. I bought a surprise pack and thought they would give me fruit and vegetables which with my (new) awareness of what I was eating came in handy. but what was my surprise when I arrived for my surprise pack and it came with two plastic containers and some mushroom burgers wrapped in plastic. Fail number one. Although we might think it wasn’t my fault, by accepting those products I automatically became part of the problem. On Thursday I realized I didn’t have any more coffee which meant that I had to go on a another trip to the bulk shop to get more, and while there I bought some more pasta and some cereals. When I was in the store very happy with my containers I noticed a supermarket chain nearby and after taking a mental tour of my kitchen, I realized that there were some things I needed like cheese, meat and olive oil; so I made my way with my full glass containers, in my cloth bag, to buy what I needed.

In the delicatessen and butcher’s department of this supermarket, they do not accept that you give them your own containers for sanitary reasons (I had already asked) so the second fail of the week came when I bought cheese, meat and chicken, all wrapped in paper with a plastic film and in a plastic bag. At this point I already felt like a total failure and the worst example of a sustainable lifestyle. As dramatic as I am this was overstated. The weekend arrived and I (finally) bought my cloth bags for fruit and vegetables. In my mind this compensated for the excessive plastic of the week. While at a local fair, I didn’t have anyhting to drink, except a beer in a glass bottel, for fear of being given a plastic bottle. So I opted for an ice cream I had tried last year and remembered it was very good: a lemon popsicle with peppermint and ginger. News flash: the popsicle come wrapped in plastic film *inserts face slap emoji here* Still, I must say I enjoyed it too much because of the heat.

Finally Saturday night arrived, celebrating a friend’s birthday and I ordered my Gin Tonic without a straw. I had remembered to say “mine without a straw”! so ending the boycott plastic week like this waslike putting a star on my forehead.

What I learned this week

If after the detailed narrations of my week without plastic you are still here, this is what I learned and what I’m taking from it. Reducing our consumption of single-use plastics may seem easy, but it can get a little complicated depending on our lifestyle and family situation. For me it’s easier because I do my shopping for one person, but for large families buying in this way can be complicated at first. There are also times when we don’t realize that something comes with plastic until we have it in our hands (the example of the popsicle comes here) and there are other times that because of shame, comfort or beacuase we’re in a hurry we accept these plastics and think that the next time we’ll do it better.

To stop using products warpped in plastic or made out of this material is a change of mentality that takes time for it to become a habit. We should not think about eliminating everything from the start or feel bad about not doing it 100% right since the beginning. My reflection, and advice, is that we start by analyzing the amount of products we have with plastic and how we can replace them. We can do research on where to buy bulk and local products and join groups where we can ask for advice on how to improve over time. Starting with these steps is what we need to continue on the path to a sustainable lifestyle and just with starting, we are already helping the planet.

Let’s make the plastic boycott an everyday issue, just like all other waste. Let’s follow ecological influencers, brands that make and think differently and so together, step by step, we will begin to see a change.

Photo by Laura Mitulla on Unsplash