An experiment in living plastic-free is no easy task

Amid a recent flurry of worrisome reports about plastic, a simple question came up: Could we live without it?

Could my typical family -- a mom, a dad, a 3-year-old girl and a 7-month-old boy -- put aside what seems the very material of American lives. I decided to try. For a week, I pledged to buy no new plastic and keep the kids away from it.

It meant putting away the plastic kids utensils and plates and sippy cups and pacifiers. Bringing our own bags to stores and forgoing Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and candies. Cooking more and relying less on frozen foods.

So daunting did it seem that the day before I started, I binged like a dieter snarfing cookies. Two bags to pick up dog poo. Plastic-wrapped fruit snacks. Gatorade and Vitaminwater. I bought clothes that came on plastic hangers, and when the clerk offered a plastic bag, I said, “Yes!”

“Nobody likes change,” Peter Lobin of eco-friendly Solid Waste Solutions Corp. “But I think the world is changing.”

Canada has banned the chemical bisphenol-A, believed to mimic estrogen in the body, from use in plastic baby bottles. Melamine, used to make certain kinds of plastics, has been found in eggs, infant formula and milk from China. Plastic doesn’t degrade for hundreds of years.

Our family of four, which on average buys or discards 200 plastic items a week, would try to break our addiction.

“No one can do the whole thing in one week,” warned Beth Terry, an accountant in Oakland, Calif., who blogs about trying to live the plastic-free life at Fake Plastic Fish. “I hope you will stress to your readers that the best way is to take it one step at a time.”

Indeed. By the end of my plastic-free week, I had cut our family’s plastic consumption dramatically -- and unexpectedly and delightedly lost weight. On the downside, my bank account got leaner too.

To start, I bought two stainless steel water bottles for a total of $45 and a $9 all-rubber pacifier at Whole Foods. Papery diapers and biodegradable dog poo bags from Target. A hockey puck-shaped bar of shampoo at LUSH that smells like jasmine for $9.25. And to replace baby wash, soap that smells like honey and costs nearly $40 a pound.

Going plastic-free clearly required an outlay of cash.

Day One

I wash my hair with the shampoo bar, put my son in a paper diaper and talk up the new Hello Kitty stainless steel sippy cup that has replaced my daughter’s plastic one. Smugness sets in as my girl swigs milk and my boy sucks on his rubber pacifier, content.

Then I hit a wall. Breakfast. The only plastic-free options are bananas and oatmeal. My girl wants neither. I feed her cereal out of a plastic bag with milk from a plastic jug.

I have trouble finding plastic-free lunch. I go without. I drink nothing at work. I don’t have a non-plastic cup.

I talk to Katrina Davidson, who keeps a blog, Kale For Sale. She lives outside San Francisco and accidentally became plastic-free when she started eating local.

“It’s about not going to the grocery store. At the grocery store, everything is packaged. All of the berries are in plastic containers. The lettuces are all in plastic. The mushrooms.” Davidson goes to the farmers’ market and brings her own containers.

Day Two

Despite Davidson’s warning, I go to Whole Foods, which boasts of its green efforts.

So why does it seem that everything is in plastic?

I buy a random assortment of groceries: A bottle of drinking yogurt, cider, two pounds of bananas, a turkey meatloaf, flax cookies, three red potatoes, tomatoes, eggs, oatmeal and pretzel crackers from a company called Eco Heaven.

Their motto is, “The best crackers in the world, the best crackers for the world.” They are in the shape of a hybrid car, a sun (for solar energy), a wind turbine and Earth.

The best crackers for the planet are also in a plastic bag.

“We tried to find something more eco-friendly from a packaging perspective,” said company President James Sego. “But . . . we would have two weeks of shelf life.”

And those crackers need to be able to sit on the shelf for nine months, he said.

Day Three

I wash three Ziploc bags and dry them inside out.

Day Four

I clean the house with baking soda, a mix of water and vinegar and balsam fir essential oil I got at Whole Foods for $13. Our house smells like salad dressing and Christmas.

Day Five

Our last pre-experiment trip to Target had resulted in 13 plastic shopping bags, a plastic bag of Halloween candy (all wrapped individually in plastic), one bag of plastic disposable razors, two boxes of cereal in plastic bags, three plastic bags of frozen mangoes, two plastic bags of polyester kids pajamas and two plastic sippy cups encased in plastic.

This time, my husband volunteers to go: “OK, so what do we need? Bagels?”

“No! We need to get those from the bagel store, which sells them in paper bags.”

The day gets worse. We decide to go back to Pampers at night. The paper ones have leaked three nights in a row.

Day Six

My vow to avoid plastic ends with a small decaf topped by a plastic lid. The coffee tastes bitter and I feel guilty. This is the first time I have purchased something plastic that I felt was not necessary.

That night, I lie awake, unable to sleep. The coffee, I conclude, had probably been regular and full of caffeine. Karma.

Day Seven

I notice my jeans are looser, probably because I haven’t been snacking on anything for seven days. I like this.

Epilogue

At the end of the plastic-free week, I estimated that we had cut our plastic consumption in half. To celebrate, I made lasagna, guiltily using ingredients that came in plastic. Living completely without plastic, it seems, is nearly impossible.

“Until you become aware of it and you are looking for it, you don’t realize it,” said Terry, the accountant who catalogs every piece of plastic she uses on her blog. “And then you realize how everything is plastic.”

I am hyper-aware of plastic now. It’s like I can smell it.

I continue to use paper diapers. I try to reuse Ziplocs. I tote my steel water bottle to work, and my daughter continues to love hers. I use the shampoo bar, and I clean the house with vinegar and baking soda. When I shop, I try to bring my own bags, and I let my produce roll around in my cart,.

But I do sneak a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee every so often. And I still end up with a lot of plastic when I shop.

The big difference: I feel a twinge of guilt when I do.

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ttsouderos@tribune.com