Plastic is an omnipresent material in our lives, but at the same time, it is a great pollutant. The production of plastic requires huge amounts of energy, and more than 90% of it is made from fossil fuels. We should bring awareness to the importance of minimizing the use of (mainly single-use) plastic and try to almost completely eradicate it from our everyday lives.
This is why the Plastic Free July movement, which informs and advises people worldwide on how to reduce single-use plastic waste at home, at work, or even at a local coffee shop, has been created. We invite you to join the movement and give you easy-to-follow advice on getting rid of plastic.
Stop reading and look around you – how much plastic do you see? Water bottles, yogurt cups? Bags, bottles, straws, and coffee cups are the most common single-use plastics. How to avoid them?
One way to reduce plastic is to use a multi-use cotton bag instead of a plastic one. Besides being more durable, cloth bags can save more than 100,000 sea animals a year from being suffocated by plastic bags. They are also useful for buying groceries that are not pre-packaged, so buy from your local farmers’ market. We can buy cloth bags in various stores, but we can also easily sew them in the size of the groceries we buy most frequently.
Another way of avoiding plastic is buying a glass water bottle. By doing that, you would use over 1460 plastic bottles fewer in a year. Plastic straws have great alternatives, such as bamboo, paper, or metal straws. Once popular, thermos bottles are back in style today. By using a stainless-steel thermos instead of a single-use coffee cup which usually has a plastic lining, you are choosing a sustainable alternative that will keep your coffee hot for up to 12 hours without warming up the planet.
Try to plan office meals in advance and bring home-cooked food to work in containers that can be washed and reused. You can also look up to us – since last year, Dialog has been doing Meatless Monday, which means that every Monday, one person from the team cooks for everyone. This has drastically reduced the amount of single-use plastic in which we wrap delivered food. We also use (ecological) refillable cleaning agents, which we buy in bulk, and we have gotten rid of plastic water containers since water in Zagreb is potable and meets all hygienic standards. Happy Plastic-Free July!