Some years ago, I sat behind a desk in my Norwegian apartment, and I watched a video of a researcher who carried out an autopsy of dozens of birds that were found dead on a remote island located hundreds of km far from civilisation. The cause of the deaths – fragments of bottle caps, lighters and other plastic pieces accumulated in their guts.

Plastics are, among other properties, notable for their durability. But the ability to withstand the pressure of beverage carbonation or heat of vacuum packaging process is certainly not appreciated by animals who unintentionally add plastics to their diet. Animals cannot digest plastics and with their bellies full, they have a hard time to take in nutrients and stay healthy, bring up offspring and grow properly. In the worst case scenerio, ingestion of plastics leads to their slow but sure death by starvation.

Watching the light in the eyes of the beauty to die out is heart-wrenching. And many of us will want to do the right thing and will come to conclusion that plastics are bad, so lets´s use something else instead. Unfortunately, we live in a very complicated world and many times we seek fast and easy solutions for complex problems.

• One of the main obstacles to achieve our do-good attempts to better the world is, that there is no green product. Everything that we produce and consume is made from natural resources at some point or another and has environmental impact.

• Another one is, that most of the solutions we apply treat the symptoms, but not the disease. In this case, the disease is our throw away culture.

There is no green product

We are drowning in plastics. We produce more plastics year after year as the population grows, but we also produce more regardless of the population growth. Per capita production of primary plastics tripled in last 25 years with an average annual increase of around 1kg/person.

We buy 1 million plastic beverage bottles and 9,6 millions plastic bags each minute worldwide. Both of the items are among the top 5 picked up by volunteers during beach clean ups. By 2050, plastics in oceans will outweigh fish, states a report from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, in partnership with the World Economic Forum. Just the prospect of it frightens me.

But one of the reasons plastics are ubiquitous is their ability to do more with less. Life cycle assessments of carrier shopping bags, that compare 3 most widely used materials – plastics, paper and cotton indicate, that plastic bags are better choice than the alternatives in terms of their net environmental impact. Unless you are willing to use a cotton bag for year or a paper bag repeatedly. A comparison of other single used plastic items –  like bottles, cups or cuttlery to their alternatives brings the same results.

Paper and cotton products have a merit of being made of renewable resources and being biodegradable. However, these qualitites do not have any inherent value in the scope and nature of our production and consumption. Replenishment of renewable resources does not occur naturally, but under controlled conditions on vast areas and it disrupts material exchange and diverse bonds at that area. And just imagine how much land we need to harvest all the trees and cotton to produce the millions per minute volume that we use today.  

Some companies and consumers look at innovative products, such as biodegradable plastics, bioplatics and compostable products instead of abandoning single used products altogether. But the introduction of innovative products to a system that is used to more traditional waste stream or that does not include biodegradable feature brings its own challenges. These products will not decompose in 3 to 6 months when you just toss it on a backyard or into a river. And what is the point of using biodegradable product, if it ends up in a landfill or is burned?

In the big picture perspective, substituting one material for another without making any other changes will not do much difference. It is not only plastics production that is rising. Also our population doubled since 1972 and the amount of materials extracted, harvested and consumed worldwide increased by more than 60% since 1980. And sadly, the moment we claim the ground, most of the animals breathe their last.

The right thing to do is not solely about an ideal alternative or a green material, that we can switch to. It is about how we use things and about extending our focus from ourselves to the world around us. Behind the walls of our rooms and beyond the borders of our cities, there is unique environment that we are part of and that is perfectly fit for our survival and prosperity.

The disease of throw away culture

 „Hi… And Bye!“ could be one of the slogans that best describes our interaction with objects and even people. We make a bunch of disposable products and create fashionable solutions whose novelty outweigh their necessity and offer immediate but temporary gratification. Our physical and digital space is occupied with slogans that encourage us to feel a certain way and intensify our cravings.

And it works because we form our self-image based on environment we are exposed to  and through interaction with others. We evaluate ourselves and those around us by what we display and we create habits in the process, that are hard to break. We link the stuff that we buy with our expectations of being a good mum, cool kid, someone special or a wise guy. But with so many innovations, new brands and models the comparison game never ends.

Material depletion, destruction of home to countless species, pollution and waste are behind the curtain of operations at all stages of production process and our everyday lives. Most of us are unaware of how the products are made and companies are not willing to share the origin of the ingredients they use. „Hundreds of species died, because we burned their home down“ is certainly not a sort of information that will show on the packaging of biscuits.

But why do we buy all the stuff?

We need things. We do shopping, because stuff that we buy, enable and enhance our experiences and very survival. We need food, a place where we can put our head down and many other things that participate on making us feel safe, adventurous, healthy, reliable, caring, or they keep our thinking fresh.

But today we also do shopping for various other reasons. We buy things because we are bored and have nothing to do and we want to fill an empty space in our schedule. We want to distract ourselves from projects or decisions we do not want to deal with just yet. We buy things, because we crave novelty and the excitement of the things we own and experience, wears off. Or we just cannot help it.

The stuff that we buy make us feel good and shopping is easy. You swipe a card through a device or click a button. But buying and owning things also comes with responsibilities. We first have to afford them, spend time using them, and then clean and maintain them. Repetitive shopping that lacks clear intention or sense of purpose can add more stress to our lives and can put human interaction or experiencing of pure joy of everyday moments on a back burner.

It is easy to think that individual actions have very little to no impact on our planet and that the effort to nurture and protect it is superhuman. But gradual steps in our every day lives – at home or at work can benefit both us and the planet. But it has a downside. We are dependant on the surroundings we have created, so we have to take these steps.