Let’s all start carrying proper cutlery with us!
The moment I saw the article appear in one of the latest issues of National Geographic, I just knew I will write about it. Carrying your own cutlery! Such an easy and effortless way to reduce the use of disposable plastics and consequently minimize pollution. Yet, it is so uncommon these days.
I started carrying cutlery with me (actually I started with a spoon), when I was at university. Please do not judge, my reasoning had very little to do with the environment. In short, it came down to me being broke but having an incredible addiction, sorry, love for ice cream. However, those ice cream shops, they can really hit your wallet, just like coffee chains. Before you know it, you are spending 1/3rd of what you would spend in a super market, only to satisfy a craving. So I figured, if I have my spoon with me, I can always buy ice cream from a supermarket, and not worry that it would not come with a disposable spoon.
OK, I know it is lame. It is also the reason why I love that episode of the sitcom Friends, when Joey pulled out a fork from his jacket and attacked the cheese cake on the floor (“The One With All The Cheesecakes”, Season 7).
So as the years passed, my addiction faded, but the spoon remained in the bag. I also switched from eating sandwiches to eating home made salads for lunch. The result was that I added a fork to the set, along with a salad box.
It is not entirely clear to me why people wouldn’t do this. I guess it might cause a slight inconvenience, but if that would be quite a bad excuse.
Reducing the use of disposable plastics is an absolute must. If we care even a tiny little bit about the future of the planet, we all have to do our part. One step at the time. Packing up your own cutlery, along with the lunch box is so simple, yet almost no one is doing it. Let’s change that! Start today!
It is those little things that we can do, which make the difference. It is a very small, but significant step towards solving the plastic crisis. It is so easy to take part.
Image (c) national geographic
Well I drink my coffee black, no stirrer required, and I don’t drink soda, no cup or straw either.
I also strongly recommend the nice and light stainless steel bottles you can find now.
I never bought plastic cutlery, my typical parties or barbecues were never big enough, I have a ragtag set of real cutlery, mostly scavenged or donated, that I use or lend for this purpose.
What worries me more is the unavoidable amount of plastics in food packaging. Even the new so-called compostable disposable bags still end up in tree branches and in the sea and ultimately degrades into nanoplastics that end up in our guts, because they are still mostly the same plastic bags as before, with a bit of starch added to speed up biodegradation, but that works only in industrial composing facilities with the right amount of heat and moisture and oxygen provided. In real nature, these new bags still persist for years.
Still lots of room for improvement, from changing mentalities to making plastics from renewable oil to better recycling, etc.