Our Planet’s Plastic Problem, Can an Old Dog Learn New Tricks?

All posts may include affiliate links at no cost to you, but I get a commission which helps support my mission of traveling the world and making a difference. Thanks for supporting Travels with Tam!

Our Planet’s Plastic Problem, can an old dog learn new tricks? I think we can, and we definitely need to. This is a problem that exists in all modern cultures, so we all must learn new tricks. The New 2nd Edition of my book, All Fish Faces, just released, and it has great tips for helping our oceans, not just for kids, but for everyone!

We have a problem. A plastic problem. It is a huge problem, a problem in all of our oceans and on all of our continents, and if you aren’t aware of it, you must be living under a rock! I don’t want to go through the data and bore you, so suffice it to say that our planet is overwhelmed with plastic on land and sea. Did you know that animals and humans are ingesting micro-plastics? Microplastics are small plastic pieces less than five millimeters, often much smaller. They are in our food supply. Some estimate that we eat the equivalent of a credit card a week! If you think that is good for the human body, think again! You can google the data yourself, it is fact, and you cannot argue with facts. If you are a parent or a grandparent and care about your children, learn to teach an old dog new tricks!

Plastic is a generational and cultural addiction. I will never forget the scene in The Graduate when one of the party guests tells Benjamin to go into plastics. Well, he was right, it became big, and a lot of money continues to be made, but it wasn’t, and isn’t, good for us or for our planet. We are paying for it now, and I don’t want my grandchildren to live in a plastic trash filled world. Can an old dog learn new tricks? I’m trying!

So how do we begin to rid ourselves of our need for plastic? How do you teach an old dog new tricks? I’ve been doing Plastic Free July, and these are the first steps to get started:

1. Don’t use water bottles or plastic coffee cups, take your own reusable container!
2. Find a plastic free way to buy your produce, like paper bags.
3. Bring reusable grocery bags!
4. Refuse plastic straws at restaurants, instead, carry paper or a stainless straw. You can buy them easily and never use another plastic straw. You can take the Pledge: No More Plastic Straws!
5. Don’t buy meat or fish that is pre-wrapped in plastic, ask the butcher to wrap them in paper for you.
6. Think about the three R’s: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!

I took the pledge for Plastic Free July, and I have committed to reducing, reusing and recycling plastic. How about you? What have you done to reduce your plastic usage?

You’d also enjoy: