Changing the Culture of Throwaway Living - Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff

Uncivilize

When plastic made its foray into daily life in the 1950s, it was billed as the liberation to an existence constrained by household drudgery. Plates could be tossed instead of washed; coffee could be chugged on the go and then chucked into a rubbish bin; and frozen TV dinners could be stripped of their plastic wrap and popped in the oven at a moment’s notice. Life Magazine touted the disposable revolution in an article entitled ‘Throwaway Living’; a mere half-century later, every piece of plastic modern mankind ever made is still with us. Indeed, 8 million metric tons of these metamorphosed fossil fuels continue to enter our oceans each year, choking all life in the pervasive plastic path of its micro-pieces, and ultimately working its way up the food chain, into us.

We’ve been taught that we can use plastics so long as we recycle, but that system, is in fact, grievously broken, and perhaps never should have been the answer all along, as I learned in this thought-provoking conversation with Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff, executive director of the 5 Gyres Institute, the ocean conservation non-profit that first discovered plastic microbeads in 2012 and campaigned for a successful federal ban in 2015. But how can we even begin to tackle the 5.25 trillion particles of “plastic smog” (that’s 270,000 tons) polluting our oceans worldwide? How can we reverse the seemingly inescapable grasp of a now entrenched throwaway society? Rachel is an awe-inspiring former journalist and mom of three (as well as my friend and neighbor, lucky me!), and she digs deep in this interview -- unraveling not only the history of plastic and the roots of our throwaway society, but channeling the save-everything mentality of her great-grandmother to inspire all of us toward a post-plastic revolution through doable change.