Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Going Plastic Free

Posted by Holly Talkington

Hello, my name is Holly Talkington and I am a student here at Portland Community College. My most current role I have taken on is doing sustainability outreach through the work-study program. I am honored to join the team and take on this new role. My experience with sustainability is first being that I plan on majoring in Environmental Science with a focus on individual sustainability. I will be receiving the Sustainability Focus Award through PCC as well. Some other background I have aside from taking classes is that I attended the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Ed annual conference in Portland this year (I will talk about this more in a future post), I do research outside of school and I am currently changing my lifestyle step by step to become a more sustainable individual. My current step to living sustainably is cutting plastic out of my purchases.

December 5, 2014 was my first official start date to cut out plastics. I warmed up to this by doing a 30-day self-waste audit. This allowed me to see where the plastic was coming from. By knowing this, it allowed me to prep for my new lifestyle change. I knew cutting out plastic would be a difficult challenge, but I know this is something I will succeed in doing. This is important to me because after learning about the trash gyre’s and the amount of plastic that ends up in them it broke my heart. I decided I wanted to do my best to not contribute to them. Another reason this is important to me is because I would love to one day live a zero waste lifestyle. By cutting plastic out of my purchases I believe this will help me to reach that goal.

Some things that I have done to avoid purchasing plastic are:

• Bring my own reusable water bottle wherever I go.
• Bring my travel coffee mug when coffee/tea may be included in my day.
• Keep at least one reusable bag in my purse or backpack
• When shopping, paying close attention to the packaging to make sure it contains zero plastic.
• Switching to fresh produce and bulk food.
  • Reusable bulk bags
  • Paper bulk bags
• Making my own hygiene products.
• No online shopping.

In the past month some challenges I have faced and overcame are:

• Plastic straws! When going out to eat or get a drink I noticed that my beverage would always end up with a straw in it. I started to kindly ask my server for no straw. Shortly after taking that step I received a reusable titanium straw as a gift that I now keep with me
• Dog food, this caught me off guard. Luckily New Seasons has a kind similar to what I was using in bulk so I have switched to that and I bring a reusable container.
• Plastic utensils with takeout. I resolved this by carrying my own utensil that contains a fork on one side and a spoon on the other

Struggles I have faced and have not overcome yet, and ones that I anticipate are:

• Plastic cups… Going to Las Vegas and Reno, NV over winter break plastic cups became a problem. Lots of places will only serve your beverage in plastic. This was not easy to avoid, other than just not getting a beverage, since a lot of places were not legally allowed to fill up the container I brought.
• Produce stickers… Stickers contain plastic and they are put on produce to help the cashier. To avoid them, there are farmers markets and stores that do not use them. When I can go to these places I will, but my struggle is making time to go to these places other than the store a few blocks away from my house.
• Makeup is one I anticipate. There are companies that take back the containers to recycle; but I have yet to find one that uses no plastic. One solution may be to no longer wear makeup.

I have learned how strong my will power is when making these decisions on my own, but when I am with others not as willing to work with my new lifestyle it has been a little more difficult. At times I question if this is worth doing and contemplate just giving up. The reason I do not give up is because this is something I believe in and I want to do my part to make this world a better place for future inhabitants and myself.