The Plastic Diet

Since giving up plastic, I have lost two pounds, which is about half the weight I gained over the summer on the grounds that looking after my children full-time can only be done on full-fat lattes and doughnuts (which makes me a poor role model but I make up for that by ensuring I always have a book tucked under my arm and at least once a day screaming *really loudly* that all I want is an hour now and then to do some fucking research, and hoping that my incredible work ethic will rub off).

The reason for this unpredicted weight loss is that I have had to cut out sweets, chocolate, ice cream and sugar because all of those things come wrapped in plastic. I have mostly cut out cheese as well because I keep forgetting to take my beeswax food wrap with me when I hit the high street. (Yes, I am aware how frightfully middle-class that sounds, but there's nothing I can do about that.)

My friend Rebecca, who has also been living without plastic for the last week, has had a similar experience with cash. She did her weekly supermarket shop and found that her bill was slashed from £100 to a mere snip at £45. She says, 'The reason for this is simple. There's pretty much fuck all to buy in a supermarket that doesn't involve plastic.'



However, she does add that Sainsbury's will put your cheese in your own tub if you ask them. They will also look at you as if you're completely mad when you explain why. 'It's a bit like how vegetarians felt in the '80s, when people would sponsor you to give up meat for a week or you'd be at a wedding reception buffet and they'd ask if you still eat potatoes.'

Here's hoping going without plastic in 30 years time is as mainstream as going without meat now is. Or even better, some sort of plastics revolution, with everything wrapped in biodegradable or edible plastic.

It is easy to feel bleak about the scale of this problem. Certainly, it is vast. Stiv Wilson, policy director of ocean conservation trust 5Gyres, says, 'There are no great estimates (at least scientific) on how much plastic is in the ocean, but I can say from firsthand knowledge that it’s so pervasive it confounds the senses. You want to know what a garbage patch looks like? Imagine the night sky on a cloudless, moonless night. Now replace the ocean surface with space, and the stars with plastic; it’s dispersed and it goes on infinitely. Humans have managed to create a problem on a degree of scale that’s nearly incomprehensible and completely overwhelming.' He argues that cleaning the oceans simply can't be done. The solution to the problem must begin on land.

Bugger.

I am no scientist or inventor, just a mortal who finds all this truly disturbing. Once I'd read the science and found out just how far we've gone in degrading the natural environment, I became very, very troubled by it. Thoughts of climate change, deforestation, wildlife loss, plastic oceans... All that stuff interrupted me as I went about my life. It disturbed me as I tried to concentrate on my work. It disturbed me as I watched the news and the state of the planet was almost never reported or, worse, trivialised or dismissed by individuals who think they know better than researchers who have devoted lifetimes to studying all this. It disturbs me now, to think about this awful, awful mess and what is to be done about it.

A friend of mine, a biodiversity scholar, said to me, 'Most people don't know about the extent of the environmental crisis and when they find out, they plunge from ignorance to despair. But there is another state, and that is action.'

This is why, in my entirely non-scientist status (I failed Science GCSE - truly I know nothing), I still want to support the Ocean Cleanup. I have this idea if at least some of plastic can be cleared, it will help. But I also absolutely agree that the true solution lies in ending plastic pollution, and that begins with cutting out all single-use plastic. And that is no easy task, but there is a way and luckily, Plastic Oceans is on it.

Tomorrow, I am heading to Oxford for the day to visit the people who set up the community refill station, in the hope that I can set one up where I live. Since booking my train ticket, I have been doubting the wisdom of this venture and much of my doubt has centred on this: What is the point, when the population of Hexham is about 10,000, only a few people will use it and the population of the world is close to 7 billion? It will make no difference.

But the solution to global problems lies at local level. If one community starts something, others will slowly follow until, one day far in the future, the days of single-use plastic will be behind us and the oceans will start to recover. They cannot recover while we carry on like this.

But in the meantime, David Attenborough remains moderately upbeat. That is, he at least sticks a question mark at the end of his documentary title, The Death of the Oceans?

I know it's the weekend, but watch it. It's good and remarkably hopeful.