You probably have several of these items that contain plastic in your home right now.
It’s hard to get away from plastic. The easiest thing to do is to get serious about reducing your use of plastic, but after that, it gets trickier.
Recycling is important way to keeping plastics and microplastics out of landfills and waterways, where fish, birds and other creatures are likely to ingest them. However, there are plastics hiding in places you may not suspect. Once you know something contains plastic, you can be more responsible about avoiding it in the first place. Just like it took you a minute to embrace the reusable bag habit, these solutions just require a change of habit, but they’re easy to do.
Paper Cups
Paper cups are made of paper, right? Actually, most of a paper cup is made from paper, but disposable cups you’ll get when you pick up a cup of coffee also frequently contain a thin plastic lining. It makes sense if you think about it. If a cup was 100 percent paper, it would buckle under the load of a very hot liquid. And while Starbucks gets points for recycling 25 million used cups into new ones, we still have a long way to go on this front.
What can you do: Take reusable water bottles and coffee cups with you whenever you go. At home, use real glassware.
Tea Bags
Plastic could be hidden in two places in tea bags. The bags themselves may contain a small amount of plastic that’s added to help them keep their shape in boiling water. Unfortunately, that handy bag is also the biggest source of the problem, as researchers at McGill University in Montreal discovered. The found that steeping a plastic tea bag in water heated to 203 degrees Fahrenheit (95 degrees Celsius) released around 11.6 billion microplastics into a single cup, according to New Scientist.
In addition, the bag, the wrappers for individually wrapped tea bags may also contain a plastic lining.
What can you do: Purchase loose leaf tea and use a reusable tea infuser, which will eliminate the plastic waste and a lot of the paper waste, too. Or look for tea bags that aren’t made with plastic, like Numi, Organic Traditional Medicinals or Tetley Black and Green Tea. (Clean Plates has a list with more options.) Read more…
