John Anderson

I posted the following message on social media: Please join me in Plastics Free Ecochallenge during the month of July! Use the link to sign up. Do you want to learn about plastics and to explore the relationship we all have with systems that have been built to rely on plastics? This is about more than picking up litter. It's about appreciating the incredible abundance the Earth provides and about finding ways we can be responsible for safeguarding that abundance so it remains healthy. This is about recognizing how the same systems that hide harm done to marginalized people and to habitats are systems that shape our behavior. The systems make harmful choices easy for us, because their consequences are obscured and diffuse, and because we don't pay for the harm. Let's explore one example. When local and regional governments have made decisions not to invest in clean water supply infrastructure for their communities, those decisions lead to degradation in water quality, which leads more people to trust that bottled water is a healthier and safer choice for their families. But bottled water is more expensive than municipal water, so the decision acts like a regressive tax. It costs low-income people a larger portion of their hard-earned wages to purchase bottled water. Consider these figures. Assume a liter of water costs $1.29 at the grocery store. That's .26 gallons, so it's equivalent to $4.96/gallon. I'm currently paying $5.36/cubic foot of water at home. A cubic foot is 7.48 gallons. So, I'm paying about $0.71/gallon for water piped into my home. By the way, we have excellent water quality at home. Using the $1.29/liter assumption, the bottle of water costs nearly seven times as much as water from my tap. Imagine paying seven times as much for an $8 sandwich. Would you pay $56 for a sandwich? Most of us would not, yet we participate in a system that marks up the price of water by that amount and also requires manufacturing for billions of plastic water bottles each year. Water bottling companies do not pay for the disposal costs or the environmental harm from disposing of all those bottles, so they don't charge us for it. If those costs were incorporated into the price, the $1.29/liter would increase a lot. Keep in mind how unfair this is for low-income households. When they don't have clean water in their homes, they have to pay much more for water. That's just one of many things that makes it difficult to for families to break out of cycles of poverty. Again, I invite you to learn about this and more by spending some of your time this July, joining in the plastics free ecochallenge. https://plasticfree.ecochallenge.org/participants/join?referral_code=11881131-734f-4819-bf75-8aef5c2db0df&team_invitation=true

I will visit rePurpose website, complete the 3-minute plastic consumption calculator, and explore how I can reBalance my annual plastic footprint.

I will give a shout-out on social media to a local company, coworker, friend or family member for their plastic free or green efforts.