Dear Big Business,

 

I address you all simply this way because you’re all guilty. Just about every single one of you. I don’t claim to be an environmental connoisseur, but the mountains in my garbage can don’t leave much room for imagination. The fact that there are more microplastics in the ocean than stars in the Milky Way, gives you away. Just giving credit where credit is due. 

 

Yes, you might say that we as consumers should take action to produce less waste ourselves, but how are we to do so when every last crumb on the planet comes freshly vacuum-sealed in a plastic deathtrap? Expecting the average person to go to the store and pick up their normal needs and not come home with a new sack of trash each time is just plain ignorant. That is unless you go through the steps to help us try and salvage our beautiful planet from our dementor-like mistakes.

 

Just last week I tried to produce zero waste. I’ll give you a spoiler, I failed within the first 30 minutes. The products I have at home aren’t simply up to the standards. I did some research, and of course, there are more sustainable products available, but doing this challenge for a day, I wasn’t about to drop $100+. 

 

Back to the story, I grudgingly woke up and got out of bed around 6:45 am as usual and made my way to the shower. Hopping in, I didn’t expect to fail so quickly. I locked eyes with my shampoo and conditioner bottles. Crap. Their plastic packaging mocked me and laughed at my utter stupidity. Not feeling ready to whip up to a full day of activities with hair so greasy you could change a car’s oil with it, I broke down and put the damned product in my hair. 

 

Of course, after the shower came deodorant. Also packaged oh so nicely in a fresh plastic applicator. Great. Because I didn’t want you to be able to see the stink wafting off me, I used the stick. As you can imagine, my entire day went pretty similar to this. I packed my lunch in a bunch of plastic Tupperware, that, although reusable right now, probably won’t be in a couple of years, and I put it in a lunch bag sandwiched in between plastic ice packs.

 

Then came the worst. I had pretty much made it through my school day without using any other forms of single-use plastics, but now it was time for our first tech day for our school’s musical. If you’re not well, or slightly, versed in theatre, let me break it down for you. We pretty much spend countless hours wasting away backstage getting everything set and finalized for dress rehearsals the following week. Meaning I was going to be at school for roughly another seven hours. Having a brain the size of a pea, I forgot to pack myself dinner. My stomach was gnawing away at everything in its sight like a fat boy at a pie-eating contest. Except in this scenario, there was no pie. As one may have guessed, I broke down and had a granola bar, sadly wrapped in another failure.

 

As you can see, going through a regular person’s day is rather hard to do without catching them in the act of using single-use plastic and producing some kind of waste. That’s why the problem can be solved with you. By making products readily available in packaging that won’t be harmful to the planet, we can get ourselves back on track for the next thousands, even millions of years. I urge you one final time to take the leap: stop acting greedy because trust me, nobody likes greedy, and slap whatever it is you make in a biodegradable wrapper. The future lies in your hands.

 

Sincerely,

A Worried Consumer

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