Commonwealth Youth Forum
During Lent this year I followed the encouragement of the Church of England to give up plastic, as I was able, a less traditional but worthwhile choice during Christian season of reflection. Well, I discovered that abstaining from plastic, even partially, is nigh on impossible. Just raising my awareness of the omnipresence of plastics in my daily life was eye-opening and -honestly - discouraging. My Saturday Globe and Mail used to arrive secured with an elastic band, except when there was precipitation. Now it's always in a plastic bag bound so tightly I have to rip it open. We try to buy day-old fruits and veggies to reduce food waste, but they are often entombed in plastic. As grandparents plastic has become the uneasy reality of virtually every toy purchase and I feel as though we should go to confession when we treat them to a take-out meal.
Why have we allowed this to become so pervasive? I get positively ill when I drive past a marina where huge pleasure craft are shrink-wrapped in plastic. as are bales of hay in the fields. A CBC reporter undertook giving up plastic for a few weeks and realized that toilet paper rolls are wrapped in the sh... -stuff- and tin cans are lined with it. It's EVERYWHERE!
It's interesting that at the Commonwealth Conference, currently underway in London, there is an initiative to get the 53 participating countries to ban plastic straws. Billions of them are used every day around the world and they make their way into ditches, waterways and oceans. We largely stopped using plastic straws last year, carefully cleaning larger, sturdy straws for the grandlads. We get confused and even incredulous looks when we ask wait staff not to bring us straws when we're out for a meal.
I hope that Canada and other Commonwealth nations follow Britain's lead and ban straws. These countries represent more a billion people around the world, so it would make a significant difference. I look forward to returning to those soggy paper straws which always collapsed while drinking a milkshake (no, I don't!)
What are your thoughts on the last straw?
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