Lara Zielin

STATUS: Ready to detox.

FAVE LINKEY-POO RIGHT THIS SECOND: The fun continues with the English instructional videos. Only this time it’s technically Spanish they’re teaching. But who really cares when  phrases like “you bucket of bolts” are tossed around in a scene with an air gun.

So, sorry if this blog post scares the pee out of anyone who reads it. But it changed the way I look at most everything, so I figured it was worth sharing.

Recently I was reading 2007′s The Best American Magazine Writing, a compilation of great stories by the American  Society of Magazine Editors, and I came across the story “Plastic Ocean” by Susan Casey. The story originally appeared in Best Life magazine, and I’m so glad they’ve put an electronic version of the story online.

The short version of the story is that plastics are killing the environment–and people. Harmful plastics leech from our water bottles, our pills, our packaged food, and more – eventually getting into our body where they wreak havoc. On average, a single person tosses about 185 pounds of plastic out each year, which is really the only solution since the product can’t easily be recycled. It’s much cheaper and easier to create new plastic than it is to recycle the old.

I’m not a doomsday-er and I fully realize there are a lot of harmful things on this planet. But what I didn’t realize was exactly how bad plastics were, and what they’re doing to our bodies and our planet. They’re so common, and yet so destructive. Don’t take it from me, though. Read the online version of the article. And then trade in your plastic water bottle or Nalgene bottle for one of these. It’s at least a start.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 8:27 pm and is filed under things that suck. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.