Monday, March 28, 2016

(Not so) First world problems

Darling Husband and I, being of a certain age, take a handful of supplements every morning and evening. The sorting of a dozen pill bottles into individual doses in boxes marked with the days of the week is a sweet reminder that we are growing old together, and some of the bottles are shared. But the romantic aspect ends there.

Every week we open one or two new bottles, and the process is the same: remove the outer seal (sometimes a thin film around the neck of the bottle, other times a heavy plastic pull tab—both are good tests of fingernail health), peel off the seal from the mouth of the bottle (sometimes with a tiny fiddly tab on the edge, other times with an unpredictable cellophane pull tab that covers half the opening), and then remove the wad of cotton (or more likely polyester) so we can get to the vitamin in question. A handful of waste gets chucked into the bathroom wastebasket, and I can’t help but wonder how zero-waste people manage this invasion.

Our kids laugh at us, and verbally hashtag it as #firstworldproblems. But is it? In addition to the seals and cotton whenever we open a new bottle, we have the old one to discard as well. The glass ones are easily recycled, but at this point, the vast majority of the bottles are plastic, and the lids a different type of plastic that is not recyclable in our municipality. The vitamin shop will accept most plastic bottles for recycling (but not the lids)—and desiccant is not recyclable at all. It takes us only a few months to fill a brown grocery bag with empties, almost all of them in absolutely pristine condition.

And this is where our first world problem becomes a whole world problem: the most responsible thing we can do is recycle the bottles. They go away—from us. But where do they go? We have no idea, and it is likely that only a portion of them are ever actually recycled. I expect most people just chuck them in the bin, meaning the vast majority of them end up in landfills and eventually the ocean, where they break down into microscopic pieces and join one of the several gyres.

In a final insult, Darling Husband has a supplement that used to come in bottles of 60; now the same sized plastic bottle holds only 30 (with a correspondingly larger wad of fluff at the top). He has discovered that four bottles can be decanted into one. We note that the manufacturer is local, so maybe it is time for us to use our consumer voice (a sort of privilege) and ask them for more sensible packaging. How about a glass bottle that holds 120 tablets? Dare we dream of a sealed paper envelope to refill our bottles? We are interested in not only our own health, but that of our fellow inhabitants and our planet as well.