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Re-visiting the B.Y.O.C. (Bring Your Own Containers) Project In 2019 the Mayne Island Recycling Society spearheaded an environmental project with the community called the B.Y.O.C Campaign. Twenty island families took up the challenge to greatly reduce the amount of single-use plastics and disposable containers used over a 60-day period. Items such as plastic bags, plastic beverage cups and lids, plastic straws, plastic take out containers, and plastic cutlery were targeted. It was a very successful experiment! It was estimated that 2,680 plastic containers were averted from landfill by this group of 20 households during the 2-month campaign. As well, overall awareness by the community of the need to reduce single-use plastic was achieved. Unfortunately we lost some ground when Covid restrictions came into effect. Not much we could do about that at the time. However, as many of these restrictions have now ended, perhaps now is a good time to re-visit the challenge and put renewed effort into cutting down on our consumption of single-use plastic. Some of the recommendations to avoid use of these throw-away plastics are fairly obvious — bring your own reusable grocery bags when shopping, use mesh or cloth bags for produce rather than plastic bags, and carry personal travel mugs for take-out coffee and beverages. Some further suggestions are: bring your own containers for take-out food and restaurant left overs where possible; refuse plastic straws, lids and cutlery; use food storage containers for leftovers at home rather than using cling wrap plastic; where possible resist buying merchandise with excess packaging; frequent the local farmstands for fresh produce where there are no plastic bags; and try re-usable cloth gift bags rather than disposable gift wrap. In situations where we haven’t been able to avoid single-use plastic, perhaps we could start a respectful dialogue to see if some alternate solutions can be found. A little discussion and some thinking outside the box can be the breakthrough. There are no doubt countless other ways to help us ‘kick the plastic habit’. Why not take up the challenge to see how many plastic containers you’re able to avoid each week! Let us know about any tricks you’ve learned on reducing the amount of packaging consumed, by sharing your experience with us on our Mayne Island Recycling Society Facebook page. - Lynda Smyth |