Two-piece plastic sushi containers, sandwich packaging, plastic-wrapped cookies, plastic beverage bottles, plastic cutlery, and plastic coffee lids. These are just some of the single-use plastics you might see on the shelf and in the bins around campus.
Looking around campus, I see empty and discarded packages waiting to be thrown away. But I also see people who have brought lunch from home in reusable glass and plastic containers. There’s an emphasis lately on individual contributions to the environmental crisis: ride your bike, take the bus, don’t buy plastic, don’t eat meat, and generally reduce your environmental impact. In the bookstore, you see signs for Saanich’s Bring Your Own Bag initiative, which hints at this trend toward personal responsibility. There’s nothing wrong with this—doing your part is important and valuable, especially in helping to shift public attitudes toward humanity’s responsibility to the world.
I do think, however, that emphasizing personal impact de-emphasizes the impact and responsibility of companies and institutions. You don’t need to have taken a stats course to recognize that an institution like Camosun produces much more waste than any one individual. In addition to managing our personal waste, we should be pressuring institutions like Camosun to reduce their waste, too.
Camosun doesn’t do a bad job, but there is always room for improvement. In addition to all the plastic in the cafeteria (which is run by Aramark, yes, but surely Camosun has some say in how they operate on campus), there are also paper plates, boxes, and bags. Which, yes, are made from trees, but at least they don’t take 500 literal years to decompose and are made from something that is (fingers-crossed) renewable. Camosun also has a recycling program, but, as we know, “recycle” is the third word in the phrase after “reduce” and “reuse.” The recycling program is also dependent on students who are notoriously unreliable and—myself included—lazy. Cutting plastic off at the source would be more effective and more efficient.
There are alternatives to the plastic packaging being used in the cafeteria. Paper is number one. Paper bags are available for most of the bakery items in the cafeteria, but not cookies. Why? The only reason I could think of was cross-contamination, but I asked, and all the baked goods are potentially nut contaminated. It seems like unnecessary discrimination against the cookie to wrap such a good thing in such evil packaging.
Sandwich containers could be replaced with wax paper or new plastic alternatives such as bioplastics or corn plastics. The latter goes for sushi containers, coffee-cup lids, and cutlery as well. The point is that there are alternatives to plastic packaging.
Of course, as with everything, cutting plastic is going to cost money. Camosun might even need to introduce a new student fee. But I would personally be willing to pay a couple of dollars more if it meant transitioning our college away from plastics. And, by the way, there is already a $0.15 monthly fee to transition the college to recycled paper. Where is my recycled paper plate?
Pressuring institutions like Camosun to make this change is an important step in the fight against plastic pollution. Consumers often won’t go out of their way to avoid plastic, but they also won’t go out of their way to use it if it isn’t available. Taking plastic off the table will help to keep it out of the trash and out of our oceans.