Tamara Harbar
Going Green

My mom has a saying. When she finishes a project, she stands back, checks out her handiwork and says, “Well, it’s not perfect, but it’s better than it was.” That’s exactly how I’m feeling about my first step in fulfilling my New Year’s resolution to reduce waste.

Plastic bottles of all shapes and sizes wheedle their way into my house, filled with dish and laundry detergents, hand soap and shampoo. To keep the “pollies” – polyvinyl chlorides, polyethylenes, polypropylenes, and polyethylene terephthalates – out of the landfill where they’d leach toxins into soil and water, I’ve happily and conscientiously recycled all plastic bottles.

Recycling plastic also means less petroleum has to be extracted to make new plastic. Natural gas, the source material of most plastics and a non-renewable resource at that, is better used to heat our homes instead of packaging soap.

But I’ve been learning that most recycling doesn’t actually recycle anything. The word ‘recycling’ makes it sound as if an object will return to being what it once was, when in fact there’s no going back.

A recycled detergent bottle probably won’t become another detergent bottle. Plastic gets weaker each time it’s processed, so when new items are produced from recycled plastics – like those reusable grocery bags made from plastic water bottles – that’s not recycling, that’s downcycling. Recycled plastics degenerate into low-quality items or non-recyclable items, like car bumpers. Eventually, recycled plastics are unusable and end up as trash clogging a landfill, blowing in the wind or floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

So recycling, aka downcycling, isn’t the answer to our waste problems. Instead, recycling is like bailing water out of a flooded basement when a pipe bursts and thinking that’s enough of a coping strategy. In a flooded basement, we’d turn off the taps before we did anything else. And we need to turn off the tap that lets plastic flood into every corner and crevice of our lives and our planet, too.

But I don’t control that tap. And I need to buy laundry detergent. Frustrated, I went shopping and unexpectedly discovered a box of Nature Clean’s eco refill laundry liquid. I’ve already been using Nature Clean’s laundry liquid and really like it. This time, instead of buying a huge plastic jug, I bought a recyclable cardboard box (94 per cent unbleached post-consumer content) with a detergent-filled plastic bag inside (saving over 80 per cent on plastic packaging). The three litres of concentrated detergent should be good for 129 loads, or three of the usual plastic jugs. I also bought their eco refill for liquid hand soap.

Although I looked into places where I could bring bottles from home for refilling, I didn’t like the ingredients on the products available, mostly because I’d need a chemistry degree to understand them. Nature Clean uses all non-toxic, non-carcinogenic and biodegradable vegetable-based ingredients – no petroleum – and even posts its Material Data Safety Sheets online for the world to see (and no, Nature Clean isn’t paying me for this plug, but if they’d like to, I’m available).

I’ll still have plastic and I’ll still recycle everything I can. And while this change on my part seems like a drop in the ocean, you know what my mom would say: “It’s better than it was.”

Web Peek of the Week
www.naturecleanliving.com