As July comes to an end, so does the international challenge ‘Plastic Free July’. This challenge, which started in Australia, has grown into a world-wide campaign encouraging individuals cutout single-use plastic from their everyday life.
At Green Action Centre, we have just finished our second year of hosting events to celebrate reducing single-use plastics, and raising awareness about the issue of plastic waste.
Our first event to kick off the month was a plastic free lunch at the Forks Market Plaza, with food generously catered by Tall Grass Prairie Bread Co. Over 75 people attended this event, enjoying lunch without any single-use plastic.
Following the success of that event, we hosted a documentary screening of the film Plasticized, followed by a panel discussion.
For our third and final event, we called the public to action. We hosted a letter writing campaign targeted to grocery stores, advocating for the reduction of single-use plastics from their business.
Green Action Centre is proud of Manitobans for taking the challenge to cut out single-use plastics from their lives.
Despite the official challenge being over, the work is not yet done. There is still a tremendous amount of plastic and microplastics littered in our streets, forests, and oceans. With everything we have learned this month, we are encouraged to continue the challenge far past July.
So where do we go from here?
A few steps could include:
- Bringing your own reusable produce and shopping bags when you are grocery shopping
- Make sure to bring your own cutlery when grabbing take-out
- Always bringing a reusable water bottle and/or coffee thermos with you
- Refusing straws and carrying a reusable option
Living a sustainable lifestyle may be more nuanced, but these small changes can have a lasting impact.
For a further commitment, talk to your family and friends, request restaurants and grocery stores to reduce the amount of plastic they use, write to your policy makers and encourage them to put measures in place which can help us break free from our addiction to plastic. We believe in you.Good luck out there!
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The ending of plastics is a really nice idea. It was an amazing and clean process. In our home, we should check a battery charge capacity by Multimeter
Big users of plastics are garden centres. I have alot of plastic pots that plants came in. Garden centres don’t take them back (least ones that I have called). As far as I can tell, they can’t go in regular recycling so my only option is garbage – unless you have other info? I have been saving these pots for years and have no use for them so want to be rid of them. Someone should be approaching the garden centres including big box ones to get them to set up recycling for these items. If they won’t, customers should know about this so we can take our business elsewhere.
You’re not wrong, Darlene! Unfortunately black/dark plastics aren’t recyclable in Manitoba. Some garden centers take back pots in good condition to reuse (and may refer to this as a recycling program) but the cracked ones do wind up in the landfill. Our suggestion would be to reuse what you can and try starting plants from seed! Not only does it save money, but you develop a much stronger relationship with what you grow!