Plastic number 3

Time to turn to plastic number three, polyvinyl chloride, or PVC.  PVC is the third most widely used plastic, and it gets a lot of bad press. It's not hard to see why, as despite it's really useful properties - it's cheap, very tough, and weathers well - PVC also has a nasty side to it.  

Most of the PVC manufactured worldwide goes into construction, and you as a consumer get very little choice in the matter. No matter how green you are, your water will be piped to you and your waste removed in PVC plumbing, and the electrical cables in your home are coated with it. There's no avoiding PVC at home. Maybe, like me, you've got quite a vinyl record collection too.

Of more concern are the applications where PVC replaces rubber. To make it soft and flexible, plasticizers such as phthalates are added. The resulting PVC is cheaper than leather, rubber or latex. You'll be familiar with PVC in waterproof coats, skiing equipment, shoes, plastic raincoats, shower curtains, shoe soles, pool liners, inflatable toys - all with that soft, slightly greasy feel. That's the effect of the plasticizers, and PVCs have a lot them of added -  most of the plasticizer market worldwide is used in PVCs.  Phthalates have been demonstrated to be endocrine disruptors, with some nasty potential health impacts.

PVC starts to degrade at just 70°C, releasing hydrogen chloride gas, so heat stabilsers are also often added. Traditionally derivatives of lead and cadmium were used, but nowadays much less harmful metallic soaps (such as calcium stearate) are used. Dioxins have been shown to form when PVC is burnt such as in landfill fires or hospital incinerators. Other health concerns are associated with the vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) that PVC is made from, which is a carcinogen. The risk in this case is to the workers during its manufacture.

It has been difficult to prove that plasticizers readily leach into the environment. They are tightly bound into the PVC, but we are all familiar with the that 'new plastic' smell from PVC products.  Many of us remember the greasy film that used to coat the inside of our car windows - that was the phthalates from the vinyl seats.  There's sufficient hard evidence for Toyota, Nissan and Honda to have eliminated PVC from their car interiors five years ago.

There have been calls for care around PVC for many decades.  As I said earlier, a lot of the PVC used in your home would prove impossible to replace with other materials.  However, you can check that you aren't wearing clothing made from PVC, that it hasn't been used in your children's toys, that you use a non-PVC shower curtain and that you avoid vinyl flooring.

Additionally, PVC products that have finished their useful life aren't collected for recycling by our council collection. PVC doesn't look good at any of the stages of it's life cycle! Needless to say - there's nothing made of PVC stocked at ZURI! The safest bet with this plastic is probably to avoid it as much as possible.

Polyethene plastic  - numbers 2 and 4

Last time I wrote about the problems surrounding the use of plastic number 1 - PET, and how it's fairly easy to substitute plastic drink bottles with other alternatives.  

Plastic number 2 is high density polyethene, also known as polyethylene.  HDPE is a really useful plastic, and you probably have lots of it in your home, especially in bottled grocery items. 

Milk, juice, shampoo and cleaning products are usually packaged in bottles made from HDPE.  There are eco-advantages to this, as it takes a lot less fuel to transport a pallet of products packed in such lightweight bottles, compared to glass or metal. Once they are finished with, these bottles are easily recycled and in Australia our collection rates are quite high. 

Often the HDPE is used to make products with a long life, such as buckets.  These items can still be recycled once their useful life is over.  So far so good.

The sibling of HDPE, however, is low density polyethylene.  Made from the same raw material, but with a different structural arrangement, LDPE is thinner, more flexible and, because it is used in food packaging and plastic bags, much more of an environmental problem.

So many of the applications of LDPE are designed to be single use, from cling film to frozen food bags.  People love plastic bags and often tell me that they are OK because they reuse them a few times.  But they are still in landfill forever, so much so that they actually help to stabilise landfill.  We create new mountains out of all our garbage, with the contents safely sealed away from effective decomposition. 

I never use or accept plastic bags, and yet I seem to end up with huge collections at home, so ubiquitous are they. It is possible to recycle them outside Coles or Woolies.  We recycle all the LDPE packaging from ZURI this way.  Of course lots of places have banned the use of plastic shopping bags, or charged for them in order to encourage people to shift away from using them.  South Australia leads the way for Australians, as they do with deposits on drink bottles and cans. People seem to survive!

A word of warning though.  Don't be conned by the many plastic bags that proudly boast that they are 'degradable'. All that means is that they have fillers in them that allow the bags to break into small pieces once in landfill.  This creates a secondary environmental problem as tiny scraps of plastic are scattered far and wide. The plastic doesn't go away, it just gets dispersed more efficiently into the environment.  

That's another worry, as plastic out in the environment is ending up inside wildlife.  A floating plastic bag can look like a sea jelly, be ingested by and animal who then dies and decays, releasing the bag to kill again.  Tiny scraps of plastic are a real threat to fish and birds.

What's the alternative?  You can use newspaper to wrap your scraps in, as our parents and grandparents did, or use cornstarch plastic bags for your rubbish.  They perform just as well and LDPE bags and because they are made from a corn-based polymer, they are not only sustainable but will biodegrade in landfill.  

At Katoomba ZURI we stock a range of fully compostable kitchen bags to suit every purpose.  They are certified to the European standard EN13432 for home composting and Australian Standard AS4736-2006. 

We have bags to line your kitchen compost collection - the full bag can then be tossed into the compost bin. We have rubbish bags in various sizes, small all purpose bags for lunches and fruit & vegie storage, bags for dog waste, and even a clingfilm.

There's nothing stylish about carrying your shopping in a plastic bag, but our ever popular envirosaxs have that problem solved.  They roll up neatly to carry in your handbag, meaning you are never caught short without a bag when shopping.  they are strong too, and can take up to 20kg.

To buy your fruit and vegies, we have several fabric options, which are reusable and double for storage in the fridge.

I can remember when plastic shopping bags were new and exciting.  We took to them with gusto, though Americans stuck with the paper sacks. The first bags were thick and glossy and plastered with cigarette advertising.  Times have changed!  Can you imagine that now?  Shows that change is possible.

Plastic number 1

A little while ago I was at a Tupperware party - which is all about plastic.  I don't have a huge problem with plastic when it's designed for long term use.  I've had some of my food storage containers for years and years and they're great.  So much food might be wasted without them and its a better way to store leftovers than putting cling film over a bowl or plate.  (I'm trying to train Mr C out of that habit!).  

But... plastics designed for single or short use applications are a HUGE problem.  Picture the pile you are leaving behind you as you go through life throwing away all those sandwich wrappers, toothbrushes, disposable razors, shopping bags, shampoo bottles etc etc and most of all, those rotten soft drink and water bottles.

At the Tupperware party, the sales lady asked if we knew what the '1' on the base of drink bottles meant.  Several women thought they had heard that it meant 'single use'.  I was quite horrified by this, and wondered if this urban myth was widespread.  By that logic, anything marked with a '2' should be used twice, anything with a  '4' should be used four times - well you see the problem.  

It is true that plastics made from the monomer polyethylene terephthalate (PET) are ideally suited to single uses, such as drink bottles. But the claims that was made that these bottles shouldn't be reused and that the plastic 'dissolves' into the water the more often they are refilled were just rubbish.  With that sort of misinformation around, it's no wonder that people feel overwhelmed by the environmental messages they are asked to absorb. 

For a start, if plastics dissolved easily in water we wouldn't be able to store liquids in them.  There wouldn't be the Great Pacific Garbage Patch either, as the plastics would be dissolved in the ocean, instead of floating in small pieces on it. PET bottles are easily recycled into a whole host of other products, including polar fleece, which is great.  However, bottles have to be collected for recycling, and that just doesn't happen with most of them.  On the rare occasions I'm in a food court I get quite anxious watching all the recyclables being dumped in with the rubbish. Discarded water bottles make up about 38% of general waste.

PET is also known as polyester and clothing made from that certainly doesn't go anywhere fast. This is one of the two main concerns with using this polymer.  While it can be recycled, most of the PET produced (and it's the third most commonly made polymer) just sits in landfill forever, after a very short life of use.

The second problem is related, and it's the sheer amount of oil used to make and transport a single use item, such as a drink bottle.  It's just wasteful to use up to seven litres of water and a litre of crude oil to produce and transport one litre of bottled water.  When surveyed, most people prefer the taste of tap water and many can't even tell the difference.  Australians are blessed with fantastic tap water and there's only 1% of the environmental impact compared to drinking bottled water. 

Soft drink is even worse when you look at the number of kilojoules in a typical bottle.  Many of us couldn't eat the number of kilojoules we easily consume in liquid form - we would simply feel too full to keep eating. 

Planet Ark reports that one bottle of water has the same impact as driving a car 1 kilometre, more than 65% of the bottles up in landfill and it takes 314,000 barrels of oil a year to make the bottles for the Australian market alone.  Not very long ago nobody drank from PET bottles, and yet now Australians spend $500 million a year on the things! 

If all the environmental negatives don't make people change their behaviour, then what will?  Maybe the answer is hinted at in the claims made by the Tupperware lady.  If people think their health is affected by the plastics they use, then maybe they will change. And new evidence is emerging that PET as its commonly used may leach endocrine disruptors such as phthalates and antimony. 

The solution, as it so often is, is simple.  Buy a stainless steel water bottle in a size that suits you and with a design that delights you.  Fill from the tap.  Enjoy.  If you want to add bubbles, an investment in a Soda Stream will save you a fortune over time, more than repaying your initial investment.

Lots of lovely water bottles are always available at both ZURIs.