Around the world, more and more people have realized the destruction of plastics to people’s living environment, so they have chosen to join the team of a plastic-free life. Living without plastics is an environmentally friendly lifestyle invented by Irene Rhodes, an Australian environmentalist, aiming to reduce the plastic pollution by avoiding the use of plastic products when shopping and throwing away rubbish. After adopting this lifestyle, she only made a small glass jar of garbage for two years.
However, in the beginning of 2020, a sudden natural disaster hit the world. Since mid-March, Covid-19 has spread rapidly in Europe and North America. The spread of the virus has restricted the basic lives of people from all over the world. And travel in some areas has become a difficult problem. The strong infectivity of Covid-19 makes most shopping malls and stores only temporarily closed, and supermarkets selling daily necessities can only limit the flow to control customer access.
Covid-19 affected most people’s lives, including the plasticists. In China, the supermarket restrictions and express delivery issues are the biggest problems for plasticists. Before the outbreak, most plasticists chose to carry cloth bags or environmentally friendly bags for shopping, but because of the closure of the supermarket, express delivery has become the only option for most non-plasticists.
However, in the process of express packaging delivery, plastics are unavoidably used. Same problems also came to takeaways. Not all restaurants use reusable bags or cartons for food delivery. In China, plastic packaging and plastic bags are still the first choice for takeaway restaurants. Most importantly, the inevitable use of plastics in disinfection supplies and protective equipment during the epidemic is a severe problem for many plastic-free people.
To address these issues, interviews were employed on some people who still lived plastic-freely during the epidemic to see how they deal with these problems.
A people who named Maoqi offered a solution that is to buy groceries that can be used multiple times and to reduce the use of express delivery. She alreday live without plastic free life two years, and she shared two plastic free product we can use.
1. Silicone food seal bag. Although the price is a little more expensive, some brands of silicone are food grade, so the sealed line is better than other plastic-free products.
Maoqi, a people who live with plastic free, said: “It is a perfect replacement for disposable plastics storage bag and can be used many times after washing.”
2. Bee ‘s Wrap. It can also be used to replace plastic storage bags and has strong anti-bacterial capability.
In other respects, she chose to make her own containers to fill with disinfectants. After buying another large bottle of alcohol, she mixed and divided into plastic-free containers.
When it was necessary to order takeaway, she chose to communicate with the restaurant and she decided to pay a certain amount of money to ask the restaurant to use environmentally friendly lunch box and reusable bags.
During the interview, I also learned that express delivery was still a complicated problem that she could not solve. She tried to communicate with the express company to ask them to use plastic-free packaging, but due to the epidemic and the difficulty of express packaging, the company had to refuse her request. Trying to avoid using online shopping became her only option for plastic-free life.
Maoqi said:”I knows that it is very difficult to insist on living without plastics during the covid-19, but I will still stick to it”.
At the same time, she also hopes that after the epidemic, more and more people will realize the benefits of living without plastics.
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