Let’s talk about Plastic Free July. Hi. My name is Claire Rishima. I’m a producer on NPR’s Morning Edition who is reporting a story about my experiment going super intensely plastic free for a week. So I interviewed the founder of the Plastic Free July Movement who worked in local government in Australia at the time, and she toured a recycling plant. She recycled and she thought that it was like good. But after seeing all of that waste, kind of had a realization that creating less waste in the first place was the way to go.
One of the things that she told me was like, don’t go too hard, too fast, and don’t do it alone, especially if you’re doing it for the first time and you’re making like a big change. So my mom and dad are both doing it with me. I’ve challenged them to not buy any new single use plastics. Like obviously you’re going to use plastic. Like my glasses are plastic. I have an existing bottle of shampoo and conditioner that are plastic. I am going to run out of my conditioner probably in like the next few days. So I plan to buy a conditioner bar. I know that there are some things that like I just can’t do and that’s okay. I’m gonna do my best. I’m not gonna be myself up. And I know that if you go, sometimes I have the tendency to be all or nothing. And if I go too hard on anything, I’m gonna burn myself out. And it’s not gonna be sustainable cuz it’s gonna be too hard and won’t fit with my lifestyle.
So I’m making small swaps such as not buying things in plastic, bringing my own containers. I’m gonna try to bring my own container to the pharmacy to get my Adderall refilled. We’re gonna see how it goes. I’m also going on a trip during my plastic free week, so I feel like that’s an added challenge to be traveling with all of my reasonable containers and bags. It starts on Friday. Stay tuned.