It’s Bad for Us, Destroying Our Planet, and Secretly in Tons of Everyday Products

A Growing Recognition of the Problem of Plastic

Plastic is almost everywhere — in our bodies, our oceans, our ground, and our animals. We know it’s not good for people or the planet, yet we keep producing it, because we’re hooked on convenience.

According to National Geographic, plastic pollution has become one of the most pressing environmental issues. Rapidly increasing production of disposable plastic products overwhelms the world’s ability to deal with them.

• Single-use plastics account for 40% of the plastic produced each year

• Many products have a lifespan of minutes to hours but persist in the environment for hundreds of years, with some taking at least 400 years to break down

• Half of all plastics ever manufactured have been made in the last 15 years

• Production is expected to double by 2050

• Millions of animals are killed by plastics every year

• Once plastic breaks down into microplastic in the ocean, it’s nearly impossible to recover

• Plastic has been linked to disruption of hormonal growth and carcinogens

Something needs to change. Cough, cough, it’s us. We need to change. We need to change our consumption habits, disposal habits, our businesses, our communities, and our laws.

Companies Leading the Way: Blueland’s Campaign

Blueland’s Recent Campaign with Celebrity Adrian Grenier Educates People About the Plastic in Laundry Detergent Pods

Many brands are emerging to tackle the plastic crisis, in addition to larger brands who are working to incorporate these values into their existing products and supply chains.

Blueland, a plastic-free cleaning company offering soaps, laundry and spray products, recently started a campaign to talk about the plastic in detergent pods as a way to introduce their plastic-free detergent. They’ve enlisted the help of Adrian Grenier: actor (Entourage, Devil Wears Prada), environmental activist, founder of the nonprofit Lonely Whale, and now an investor in Blueland.

In this Instagram video, Grenier explains that those seemingly innocuous little detergent pods sneakily contain polyvinyl alcohol, also known as PVA or PVOH. And what’s polyvinyl alcohol? You guessed it: plastic.

Change is Hard, But We Can Make It Easier

I love that Blueland is educating consumers on this problem and providing a good alternative. They’re serving an important role in activating early adopters who will contribute to galvanizing this movement. They’re (hopefully) putting pressure on larger brands to innovate in these spaces to rethink their product lineup and eliminate plastic. But if we want change on a larger scale, we need to make it easier for people to recognize when they’re buying products that contain plastic. If people don’t recognize that the products they’re consuming contain plastic, then they can’t even begin to understand the scale of the problem.

I started thinking about how I am personally passionate about reducing plastic, and even I can’t even keep up with all the ways plastic is being snuck into our products! All the names it’s hiding behind makes it hard to keep track of. It’s too much. Especially since 99% of people’s lives don’t revolve around making purchases.

What About a Label?

Nutritional labeling tells us in plain English what’s in our food. Why not make companies have to disclose on product packaging whether or not the product contains plastic?

What if labeling laws required companies to clearly state — PLASTIC — so people could quickly understand what’s in their products? It’s not a magic bullet — but it could help increase awareness and enable consumers to make informed choices. Just as nutrition labels have evolved over the years to give consumers more power to make choices aligned with their values, other products should have to disclose the use of plastic.

Although we have come to expect brands to tell us what’s in our food, it wasn’t always that way. According to “Front-of-Package Nutrition Rating Systems and Symbols: Phase I Report” from the US Institute of Medicine, “After 1973, scientific knowledge about the relationship between diet and health grew rapidly, and, as a result, consumers wanted to have more information on food labels, particularly on the labels of processed and packaged foods.”

We’re now at a time where we’re learning more about the relationship of plastics to health and the environment. Consumers are increasingly interested in understanding what products contain plastic, so they can avoid it.

Here Are Some Products You Might Not Know Contain Plastic:

• Bandaids — most are made of plastics, either PV, polyethylene, or polyurethane, so switching to a sustainable alternative (like this one from Grove Collaborative) is not just better for the planet, but also means a nontoxic bandage

• Sponges — sponges contain microplastics like polyester and nylon, and as you use them to wash your dishes, naturally (or unnaturally I suppose) this means microplastics going into the water system

• Clothing — Dropps shared the many different forms of plastic in clothing, and this not only goes on your skin, but releases microplastics into your laundry, which eventually make their way to the ocean (maybe try a Guppyfriend Washing Bag to catch microplastics in your washing machine)

• Chewing gum — according to Tentree, most gum bases contain polyethylene, the same plastic that makes plastic bottles and shopping bags… the original idea came from Indigenous people who chewed tree resin, but now we make it in factories with a synthetic base (Treehugger has a bunch of alternatives for you)

• Coffee cups — National Geographic reports that the inside of paper cups has a thin layer of plastic to keep the liquid from seeping through the paper (more incentive to bring your own cup, like the KeepCup or this cute Porter one!)

• Toothpaste and other dental care products — even though microbeads were phased out (in part because of consumer pressure), toothpastes can still contain microplastics, and according to beatthemicrobead.org, more than half of dental care products contain microplastics (that you will put in your mouth!)

• Tea bags — almost all store-bought tea bags use polyethylene to seal the natural tea leaves, so you might want to use loose leaf tea instead

• Glitter — yes this celebratory material contains plastic, and it can damage our water systems and oceans (and yes, there’s a plastic-free glitter alternative for this too)

• Aluminum cans — even though aluminum is recyclable, the inside of cans are coated with a resin called epoxy… yum?

And the list could go on and on!

Do We Really Expect People to Keep Up with All These Terms?

Here are some of the many different words that really just mean plastic:

• Polyethylene

• Acrylic

• Microfiber

• Polyester

• Nylon

• Styrofoam

• Polypropylene

• Polyvinyl alcohol, also known as PVA or PVOH

• Epoxy

• Carbomer

• PVP

The answer is no, we don’t. The opposite may even be true. Companies are probably hoping you don’t know and don’t notice. But that doesn’t make it right.

Why this matters

• People don’t even realize that they’re purchasing and/or consuming plastic

• Plastic can have negative health effects

• Plastic is harmful to the environment: it can be ingested by marine animals, injure or poison wildlife, help transport invasive species, leach chemicals into the groundwater, etc. (more from EHN)

• Making plastic is bad for the environment — around 4% of world oil production is used as feedstock to make plastics, and it consumes a similar amount of energy

Empowering Consumers to Create Change

As consumers, we deserve to know what we’re putting in our body, bringing into our homes, endorsing via purchase, and putting out into the world. To effectively make informed decisions, we need information about plastic to be transparent and clear.

The more people understand the ubiquity of plastic in the products they consume, the faster we can move consumer demand to plastic-free products. This in turn should accelerate growth in smaller brands and innovation in plastic-free products from large brands. It could help us move toward a world in which plastic-free is the default option, instead of the outlier.

Wanna Collaborate?

If you’re interested in working on a prototype for what plastic labeling could look like, in terms of both language and visuals, then reach out to me on Twitter @weintraubl or LinkedIn. There could be a label for products containing plastic, and one for products that are plastic free. The important part is making it easy to quickly recognize what products contain plastic, and which do not.