Vidya Kauri, a journalism student at Ryerson University, Toronto, recently wrote this profile about my End of The World of Plastic lifestyle
Gift cards are a big problem in Tracey Tief’s life. After she had collected ten used gift cards for Home Hardware, she felt very frustrated. She called up the head office and asked the person on the other end of the line what she should do with them. The Home Hardware employee, somewhat taken aback, told her she could throw them out.
“Well, I don’t think they should be thrown out because, you know, they are going to last 15,000 years. That doesn’t make any sense to me. Aren’t they rechargeable?” inquired Tief Tracey.
Gift cards are made of plastic. There is no code on them to identify what category of plastics they belong to, and therefore, no way of telling if municipalities can recycle them. Like many other tiny pieces of plastic that are not recyclable, they end up in gyres – a circular system of ocean currents.
Tief, a 43-year-old certified health practitioner, first heard of gyres when she read an article called ‘Plastic Oceans’ about three years ago. It described the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a circular part of the Pacific Ocean that is largely comprised of plastic garbage and, by some estimates, larger than the continental United States. A sample of water in the gyre has a 7-1 ratio of plastic to plankton.
As Tief further researched the topic, she “came to understand that every gyre in the oceans is, in fact, a plastic soup.” She encountered a picture of an albatross’s carcass that was full of plastic. It had died of starvation by feeding on tiny pieces of plastic that look like plankton. The image compelled Tief, who had found the increasing use of plastic soap dispensers and disposable items since the 1980s to be wasteful, to boycott plastics altogether. She also discovered Beth Terry’s blog, Fake Plastic Fish. Terry, who was recently featured on the ABC news for striving to live a plastic-free life, was an inspiration to Tief.
Tief’s quest to rid her life of plastics was easy at first. There were obvious things like using re-useable shopping canvas bags and replacing plastic containers with glass or stainless steel. Soon, she realized how pervasive plastic is and how challenging it would be to rid her life of it.
She stopped buying pens, lighters and packaged foods. She discovered bio-degradable wax paper derived from plants, and when she needs to wrap food, she uses a vegetable cellulose plastic that does not leach harmful chemicals when it breaks down. She has a long history of buying second-hand telephones that end up working poorly. Her laptop is second-hand. Her calculator is made from recycled photocopiers. If a product has plastic components or is wrapped with plastic, she does not buy it.
The biggest challenge in getting rid of plastics is that it runs counter-cultural to North American existence, says Tief. Every time she believes she is plastic-free, somebody comes along to re-introduce it into her life. Opening the trash can in her kitchen, she says, “You can see that virtually everything in my garbage is plastic because they are very difficult to get away from. It would be pretty unlikely for me to have bought any of the items in here.”
She pulls out a plastic bag from her food co-op which is torn because she has used it so many times. Another piece of plastic was used to wrap a roti, an Indian flat-bread, which was brought into the house by a friend. There was some plastic packaging her aunt bought and left behind, and junk mail came in another plastic bag.
“Recycling plastic is just a public relations exercise. It’s often shipped overseas to be mushed up and then, it’s brought back here and shredded. Fifty per cent new plastic is needed to make recycled plastic usable again. It’s more appropriately termed down-cycling. Also, the human rights and health costs to the people who work with plastic recycling are just not worth it,” said Tief.
People’s health is important to Tief. She nurtures the people whose lives intersect hers with local and organic food. There is always a fresh pot of organic tea to welcome the many visitors to her home. (The tea leaves are often grown in her backyard.) A poster in her kitchen that shows a woman breastfeeding a baby with the caption, ‘Examine the Food Chain’ encapsulates how she feels about the health of her community. She makes a living by teaching people how to make their own non-toxic and non-petroleum-based soaps, cosmetics and cleaning products.
Her Shea Intensive Healing Lotion was deemed by the U.S-based Environmental Working Group, the foremost agency in North America that researches the effects of cosmetics, as the safest sun-tanning lotion on the market. She was recently approached by Men’s Journal magazine which wants to review her Elemental Protection Lotion which is formulated to protect skin against the damaging effects of the sun and wind.
Tief started Anarres Natural Health, her cosmetics manufacturing business, in 2006, when her employer of 12 years wrongfully dismissed her from her job as a social worker. She won a lawsuit against the company and went on to take courses at a holistic school to become a Certified Natural Health Practitioner. As her business grows, Tief wishes that people would take her simple recipes for lotions and approach someone in their local community to make them. She says that we have virtually lost the knowledge of how to take care of ourselves since everything is done in a large scale manufacturing context.
“I don’t want to supply the entire planet with products because we should regain the knowledge of how to make stuff and have stuff made locally.
“I do expect a planetary crisis. I’m not sure exactly when. I’m not sure if it’s going to be a plastic apocalypse or a nuclear disaster. But whatever happens, it’s all coming to a head and I think we need to know how to take care of ourselves. People have way more control over their lives when they know how to do stuff.”
Be inspired by Beth Terry, too http://fakeplasticfish.com/