Americans, on average, toss out about three quarters of a pound of plastic each day, according to researchers at Oxford University. Most of that trash winds up in a landfill.
As someone who loves challenges and tries to live sustainably, I wanted to see how hard it would be to live without plastic for a week. So, for seven days, I challenged myself to avoid buying any new single-use plastics.
Rebecca Prince-Ruiz started the Plastic Free July movement in Australia in 2011 after realizing how much waste her city threw out.
She gave me some tips on living without plastic ahead of my experiment: carry around reusable containers and utensils, enlist friends to do the challenge with me and don’t get discouraged when I inevitably do use plastic, to name a few.
Going into my plastic-free week, I set some rules for myself:
♻️ Cut out online shopping and food delivery
♻️ Fill my own containers in the bulk section of my grocery store
♻️ Carry a kit in my tote bag whenever I leave the house
♻️ And replace single-use plastics with plastic-free alternatives if any run out
For the most part, I avoided buying new single-use plastics — but still generated a pile of plastic waste from using up food and toiletries that I already had.
My first challenge: plastic-free eating
Most of the food I buy comes in plastic. So, I ended up making a bunch of new recipes from scratch. Sourcing ingredients around D.C. by bike and cooking took a very long time — almost like a part-time job.
Some may call this quest inconvenient – especially if you view it as time lost on tasks that could have been a 20-minute trip to the grocery store. But if you view it as picking up a new hobby to cook more and learn about your local food system – then it’s a win.
Plastic-free food I made from scratch:
🍞 A loaf of gluten-free bread (in a bread maker I found on the street)
🚴♀️Pre-workout gel (green tea, honey, citric acid, salt, magnesium)
🥤Sports drink (water, splash of juice, sea salt)
🍑Peach rings (peaches, splash of juice, gelatin, sugar, citric acid — I used an ice cube tray instead of a candy mold to avoid buying plastic)
🍯Granola bars (oats, almond butter, sugar, butter, coconut oil, vanilla extract, eggs, cranberries, salt — I lined my pan with aluminum foil since my recipe called for parchment paper, but could’ve gone without)
🍅Roasted tomato and carrot soup (tomatoes, carrots, salt, olive oil, bouillon)
Outside of the kitchen, I ordered coffee “for here” in a cafe and focused on being mindful like Price-Ruiz recommended.
Cutting plastic also required planning out my meals — so I wouldn’t be tempted to grab fast food out and about. Plus, I had to haul a heavy tote bag of containers everywhere. Sometimes, the plastic-free alternatives were more expensive.
One goal for this experiment was to make my own mozzarella, à la Nara Smith.
My local grocery store didn’t carry non-homogenized milk in a plastic-free container, and I didn’t have a cooking thermometer – only a medical one. The cheese needed to be hotter than the maximum temperature able to be read by the medical thermometer — 106 degrees Fahrenheit — so I chose to go without cheese for the week.
Another time, I held up a line of customers at the grocery store when I asked to use my own containers for salmon and yogurt almonds.
The fishmonger plopped my cut of fish into my own container, but gave me a barcode sticker on a piece of wax paper. Even though I wrote down the weight of the jar before filling it with almonds, it took three employees and about five minutes to figure out how to subtract the weight of the jar for my almonds.
In the end, they poured my almonds into a plastic bag, threw it away, and then put them back into my jar, which defeated the purpose of bringing my own jar in the first place.
The times I planned ahead — avoiding plastic was easy. I brought my own bags to the grocery store, brought my own containers to restaurants for leftovers and told friends not to bring single-use plastics when I hosted a party.
But one night, I didn’t make plans for dinner and left the house with an empty stomach, and ended up getting fish and chips in a single-use takeaway container. Another night, I had people over and didn’t have enough food to feed everyone. So we ordered food delivery which included plastic-lined paper boxes, plastic utensils and plastic sauce cups.
My next challenge: avoiding plastic in toiletries
When my shampoo and conditioner bottles ran out, I went to five stores and paid more than double what I normally would to replace them with plastic-free bars. The replacement bars I purchased were $15 and $13, respectively, while my typical plastic shampoo and conditioner bottles cost around $6 each.
I used a menstrual cup instead of single-use menstrual products and dryer balls instead of dryer sheets — both of which I already owned but didn’t always use.
My biggest flop of the week happened when I tried making my own foaming hand soap.
For context, I don’t like using bar soap – specifically for texture reasons. And I usually make my own foaming hand soap by mixing one part liquid castile soap and three parts water. I happened to run out of my jug of castile soap – which is packaged in a single-use plastic bottle. So in place of that, I used a castile soap bar that came packaged in recyclable paper.
The soap hardened and it was like trying to pump cold lumpy gravy. Luckily, I found a zero-waste store that lets you fill your own container with liquid castile soap – which will come in handy for any future attempts at plastic-free soap.
I accidentally learned a lot about composting
In the process of removing plastic from my life, including trash bags, I learned a lot about composting. I kept food scraps in the freezer to compost at the end of the week: peach pits from my homemade peach rings, the skin from a filet of salmon and unpopped popcorn kernels.
But there’s a lot of waste that can’t be composted, even if it’s biodegradable, like the dental flosser picks I got from a zero-waste shop. I opted for the picks over a spool of floss because I knew I wouldn’t use it — after all, Prince-Ruiz told me to start small.
A blog post from environmental nonprofit Oceanwatch Australia states, “While all compostable products are biodegradable, not all biodegradable products are compostable.”
Even if something is compostable and you live in a city with a composting program, it still may not be accepted. Paper is usually compostable — unless it's colored, glossy or a receipt. It’s accepted in the city of D.C. – where I reside – but they don’t recommend it.
“Technically, uncoated paper is acceptable to put in your food waste bin for composting, however, it is better suited for recycling where [it] can be turned into a new paper product,” a spokesperson for D.C.’s Department of Public Works, which oversees the food waste drop-off program, told me over email.
Hair, too, can be composted. But hair is not accepted in my program, along with dryer lint from laundry that’s made from natural fibers. They don’t accept lint specifically due to the risk of contamination with plastic fibers – since many clothes contain polyester, nylon or other plastic.
And just because something is glass — which can be recycled more times than plastic — doesn’t mean it’s recyclable. I learned that the tiny glass vial of concentrate I used when my multipurpose cleaner ran out was not recyclable, since it’s less than 2 inches in height and diameter — a size that causes it to fall through the cracks of the sorting process.
All the challenges I faced during the week reinforced something I heard from Prince-Ruiz, the founder of the movement that inspired my plastic-free week.
“Despite the name being plastic free, we invite people to try it for a day, try it for a week, or try it for the whole month and just choose one or two items rather than trying to go completely plastic-free,” she said. “Because as anyone who's tried this knows, it's really difficult.”
Going completely plastic-free was almost impossible
Ironically, some of the ingredients needed to make plastic-free items from scratch actually came in plastic — like rubbing alcohol to make hand sanitizer spray and citric acid to make peach rings.
I also found plastic in places I didn’t expect — like the cheese packet from mac and cheese, which can’t be recycled or composted. I accidentally acquired a single-use plastic cup when I brought my own cup to a happy hour and forgot to ask the server if I could use it.
My waste from the week fills a big paper grocery bag, with a total of around 102 plastic or mixed-material items — like cling wrap from my DIY fruit fly traps, a plastic lid that got warped in the microwave and the glue that attached a label to a pasta jar which may or may not contain plastic.
Individual changes are only one part of the solution
I spent a little over $200 on consumable items – including groceries, toiletries, medication and going to bars and restaurants. That total is actually around $15 less than I spent on consumables the week prior.
The biggest money-saver was cutting out food delivery and online shopping. Making my own bread saved me money, as did just serving popcorn I made on the stove instead of buying bags of chips when I hosted a party.
But, the plastic-free shampoo and conditioner bars were more than double what I usually spend. I splurged on dinner one night since I didn’t have enough plastic-free ingredients to scrape together a meal. Shopping at the farmer’s market was more expensive than a typical grocery store, which also carries plastic-free produce.
Trying to cut plastic use isn’t easy or an option for everyone, Prince-Ruiz warns. She says the cost alone is why systemic change is needed.
“Sometimes alternatives can be cheaper, especially as we're using less, but often some of the alternatives, sometimes buying things in bulk can be more expensive. And this is why we need systemic change,” she said, “So that our governments should show leadership in terms of reducing packaging and setting a level playing field for businesses.”
For some, plastic is also a medical necessity. I documented my week without plastic on social media and people were quick to point out that going plastic-free would be really hard, if not impossible, for someone who is diabetic and uses single-use plastics for insulin or people who need the flexible plastic straws to avoid spilling.
When I brought my own container to the pharmacy to pick up medication, the pharmacist — predictably — told me they couldn’t use it. Those little orange bottles aren’t accepted in many curbside recycling programs. The inability to recycle prescription pill bottles is one of the reasons Ryan Metzger started the Seattle-based company Ridwell, which picks up hard-to-recycle waste and ships it to companies that recycle it.
“We saw that there was a big community need for this,” Metzger said. “Lots of other people didn't want to put things in landfills. Lots of other people wanted to kind of regain trust in how things were recycled.”
Ridwell is only in a handful of cities, and does not currently operate where I live.
Until I find somewhere to recycle those little orange bottles I get each month, I’ll have to keep tossing them. I won’t be too hard on myself for that, since Prince-Ruiz emphasizes the need for systemic change to make it easier and more affordable to ditch plastic.
Prince-Ruiz is hopeful for the future of the plastic-free movement because she’s seen the impact of systemic change, though she says more is needed. Individual changes — while only part of the solution — can make a big splash when millions of people join a movement.
Last year, she estimates 89 million people worldwide took the challenge. Even though many may have only done it for a day or week — they kept over five hundred million pounds of household single-use plastics out of landfills.
And this year, I'm proud to have taken the challenge myself — since I know I’ll continue some of these changes beyond Plastic Free July.
This story was edited for broadcast by Ally Schweitzer and edited for digital by Treye Green.
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