The Plastic Industry is Rejoicing Over Its Conquest of our Daily Lives

Check out this post on a website called "World Plastic Industry". It describes how plastic has become indispensable in our daily lives... starting with your mobile phone and alarm clock, it goes through everything we use on a daily basis including packaging and building materials. It makes me feel so sad to realize that we have been won over with subtle but durable changes to our lifestyles that now seem irreversible.  Irreversible because in some cases, we have completely lost the incentives to create non-plastic alternatives because the whole infrastructure has changed to accommodate plastic-based solutions. One good example comes from the packaging industry.  Plastic is now being recognized as the only "hygienic" way of packaging take-out food. When I approached a local restaurant in my town to offer some reusable stainless steel containers for take out food, they decided to pass because they could not be certain people will clean their containers properly, and they do not want to take responsibility for bacteria that could eventually contaminate the food. The plastic industry is behind much of the fear circulating about hygiene in reusable products. Another example comes from the medical industry.  Look at your doctor's office, and how many items are made of plastic and intended for single use. My doctor used to take my oral temperature with a plain old disinfected thermometer, but now she uses a single-use plastic straw-looking extension that attaches to a high tech machine. The company makes money not only when it sells the machine but also when it sells the disposable plastic extensions, which the machine user is obliged to continue purchasing in order to use the machine. That's how plastic has invaded our lives... slowly changing the way we live.

Chantal Plamondon, co-owner
LifeWithoutPlastic.com

Comments

[Carmen]

Hats off to your company! I have bookmarked the blog and sent the e-store link to my mom (we'll be home in Canada for Christmas) in hopes I will get something in my stocking! Greetings from Finland...

[K. McL]

It would be one hell of an uphill battle to turn doctors back to old-style glass thermometers.

I'm not saying that it shouldn't be done - or some alternative (without plastic) found - just that it needs thought in several directions.

First, if you are old enough to remember the glass, oral thermometer, you recall a few things about it:

a) It tasted bad - the doctor or nurse used to keep it in a glass container of some nameless antiseptic solution, very much as barbers/hair-stylists _still_ keep combs standing in a vase of Barbicide. Now, no-one is disagreeing that plastics ingested in infinitessimal quantities are bad for us, but imagine how much more of chemical you ingest when the doctor/nurse whips the glass thermo out of the "barbicide" jar gives it one shake, and stuffs it into your [child's] mouth.

Whatever it is needs to be MUCH more potent than, say, mere alcohol, which (in hand-scrubby gels) does destroy some bacteria, but does not even annoy viruses or cysts. You can hear them laughing at your Purel hand-scrub.

b) That thermometer took time - often 2 minutes - to get a solid reading. Anybody who has visited a doctor these last ten or twenty years knows that that's half your visit gone, and you aren't even allowed to open your mouth.

The new electronic units are as quick as poke-and-click, and very precise. The fanciest ones interface wirelessly to the clinic's computer system to record the readings directly into your file.

Either way, glass with expanding liquid indicator, or electronic hand-held, you don't put a thermometer into an autoclave. So your plastic replacement strategy needs to sterilize the instrument between patients. Without heat. Without vile-and-nasty killer chemicals that are more dangerous to ingest than the plastic. (And liquids inserted into the ear canal are readily absorbed through the tender skin in there... it doesn't have to go into your [or your child's] mouth.)

Perhaps the disposable plastic tube-tip for the electronic thermometer could be made of cellulose. Perhaps you could go into the business of making and selling them to doctor offices that wished to start weaning themselves from plastic.

Now, with so many people unnecessarily avoiding latex (because one in 20,000 is sensitive), what are you going to do about disposable plastic gloves in doctors' and dentists' offices... and even my house, when the elder-care help arrives to bathe and do foot hygiene for my aging, diabetic mother-in-law?

Whatever it is, it needs to be form-fitting, flexible/supple, sterile, easy to don and remove, and an effective barrier to all forms of disease organisms. It also needs to be disposable in a way that creates no additional risk... or reusable after some form of very effective sterilization. Also cheap enough to be a viable alternative to vinyl.

I used up my imagination with that suggestion of cellulose disposable tubes for thermometers. Somebody else will need to suggest a glove alternative.

Carry on the good work!

- kevin (Ottawa, Canada)