Plastic is Invading our Lives (and Environment)

Yummy...

I love drinking DanActives. You know, those mini pro-biotic yogurt drinks? So, a few days back, I discovered a little fun fact on the bottle: "More than 120 bottles of DanActives are being consumed each second around the world!" And that fun fact soon becomes into a pretty horrifying fact. 120 bottles of plastic used every second! Now, if this fact proves to be true, that'd be 10 036 800 of DanActive bottles consumed every day! To put this into perspectives, it'd be roughly equivalent to 49 127 of those water cooler jugs! Or it also means that all these bottles of DanActive could fill roughly 140 Olympic sized swimming pools each year! I know that may not sound like that much, but think about it, this is only DanActive bottles we're talking about here. Milk jugs, yogurt cups, frozen meal trays... They are also thrown in the garbage.

 Our use of plastic is soon going to go overboard- or has it already? There is only so much a garbage landfill or an incinerator can do. I once read that there is a mass of plastic garbage floating on the ocean that is the size of Quebec! Not only are we occupying an enormous amount of space because of our garbage, we are also endangering the lives of sea creatures and alike! I learned that from "Happy Feet". Remember that penguin who had those soda can holders around his neck? Yup. Approximately 1 000 000 sea creatures are killed every year from plastic bags or other plastic garbage. A very scary fact.

I want to change this, and I'm pretty sure you'd like to also. But it's not as easy as it seems. We can't just stop using plastic containers and all start buying bulk food or anything. But little steps can make a difference:

1. Use fabric bags at the grocery store instead of plastic bags.
This one is pretty straight forward. Fabric bags don't cost much and they are re-usable, so you don't have to get plastic bags every time at the checkout.

2. Re-use your plastic bottles as paint brush cleaners, etc.
If you paint, like me, you can always use your Yop bottles (or any other kind of bottles or cups) as the container to hold your liquid that cleans your brushes.

3. Recycle your plastic!
I don't know about you, but a while back, I wasn't even aware that you could recycle plastic! If you see a recycling sign on your plastic item, that means that you're free to recycle it! (And I hope you do!)

Well, these are extremely basic ideas, and if you'd like more, here are a few links that gives you great ideas on how to re-use your plastic:

-20 Ways to Reuse Old Plastic (and Paper) Bags
-5 Creative Ways To Reuse Plastic Bottles (And Jugs) (I love #4!)
-Reuse Trash Ideas (I didn't read the whole thing but they seem like great ideas!)

Well, I hope that this post will inspire you to make better choices with your plastic! And if you have any more ideas or opinions, feel free to post a comment below!