I’m a plastic addict. I fill gallon-size zip-top freezer bags with tomato sauce bound for the freezer and snack-size bags with cashews bound for my purse. I stretch plastic wrap over a Key lime pie I plan to nibble on later. My husband, meanwhile, seems to pull off several feet of aluminum foil just to wrap a sliver of lime. I find these treasures littering the back of the refrigerator, looking like crumpled silver cat toys, and wonder why it was necessary to enshroud this bite of food instead of just, you know, eating it. I have also stumbled upon plastic sandwich bags filled with some slimy remnant I had tucked into the vegetable crisper months earlier, a bit of onion or half a blood orange I had meant to use.
I recently decided I’d had enough — and probably the planet had, too. According to marine research organization Algalita, Americans throw out 185 pounds of plastic per person each year, and National Geographic reported in 2017 that just 9 percent of all plastic worldwide is recycled. The first plastic sandwich bags were introduced in 1957, well before I was born, meaning that I honestly don’t know what it’s like to live without them.
I’m actually a bit of a reduce/reuse/recycle weirdo. One of those plastic gallon bags in my freezer is kept filled with kitchen scraps that I regularly turn into vegetable broth. I compost my garden waste, own Tupperware that may date to the Clinton presidency and even adopted my grandmother’s Depression-era habit of turning remnants of bar soap into liquid soap. I’m not bad at recycling, but my plastic addiction seemed unseemly, while I suspect my husband thought his foil affinity was more environmentally friendly.
The truth is, both plastic bags and aluminum foil can be recycled (but only if you live somewhere that offers recycling for those specific products), and they can biodegrade in landfills (although that could take anywhere from 50 to hundreds of years). According to a study published last year in the journal Science Advances, about 60 percent of all plastic that has been produced since the 1950s is sitting in landfills around the world, noting that “none of the mass-produced plastics biodegrade in a meaningful way.”