Month without plastic

I had been reading this blog and completely forgot about it until today. I had stumbled across another one of the BBC's topic blogs and it reminded me that I hadn't caught the conclusion of the plastics blog.

It's a really interesting look at what changes life requires to minimize the use of plastic in every day life. I was impressed at her achievement - without going to extraordinary measures, she was able to reduce plastic use by 80%! That's a huge difference, but I also don't see it as being quite as easy for everyone as it was for her.

One big problem would be meat. She was able to stop by her local butcher for non-plasticized meat; I'm not sure many towns in America even have that option any more, so what other avenues would there be there? It would also require a big change in overall eating habits. Just about everything we buy, whether it's components to cook a meal or ready-made stuff to eat or snack on, is encased in some form of plastic. I'm sure I could find a fair amount at more eco-conscious stores (though I have to give credit to Wal-Mart for the push they've lead to reduce packaging over the last few years), but can I afford the cost? It's tough enough making ends meet when we're buying groceries at the cheapest place in town; seeing a 10-30% increase in that cost would be a big hit to take.

Some of her revelations and recommendations are definitely in my mind. The biggest one was to get a stainless steel cup to use for drinking, be it water or soda. I need to cut back on soda anyway (drinking 126 ounces of sugar water a day is probably a wee bit too much...), so it's a good plan. We've been trying to use our cloth bags at the store when we go shopping for a while now, but it seems I never remember that they're sitting in the car. And I'm definitely going to try to remember to take our own containers to restaurants to use as a doggie bag instead of relying on the styrofoam containers they usually supply.

All in all, I definitely recommend giving her experience a read. It may not change your life, but it will certainly make you think about things a little more.

That brings me to what I think was the most interesting part of reading this. What the BBC has done with its blogs is really interesting to me. They've taken these stories that would have been features or series in a newspaper and turned them into the personalized topic blogs. Just based on the comments, these have been a huge hit. I've been trying to wrap my head around ways to make blogs more useful to the media, and this approach really caught my attention.

The traditional way the big media sites have done blogging - having an expert writing stories on their blog and posting them immediately rather than on deadline - certainly has its place and can be hugely effective. But I think this more personal touch is a great addition to the methodology of news blogging. It certainly can be tricky; you have to find the right person/people to right it, people that can effectively communicate through a blog and are willing to invest the time and effort necessary; you have to find a topic that is going to be appealing and figure out a way to tackle it through a blog setting that is going to be interesting and worth coming back for. So there's going to be a lot of planning and forethought to make it work, but it seems to me like there is a big payoff whenever you do it successfully.