I hate my alarm clock, and other frustrating things - Ana Maria Vascan (303)

REenk REenk REenk. Welcome to another day noticing most of the plastic I actively use. Or hopefully noticing most of it but then, one never knows…

To turn off the distressing sound of the plastic alarm is to press a plastic button (or two… or three… as there are two or three alarms). I can see the only alternative as an old-style, heavy metal and plate-glass alarm clock, as favored by Mickey Mouse. Or perhaps a very vocal rooster, or the sound of a convenient passing train. I actually hate my alarm clock passionately and with vigor but so long as I have more things to do than time to think about, the ability to wake up unassisted and be early enough for what most people consider daytime, the alarm unfortunately has to stay.

Eschewing the external alarm clock is not impossible to do either; I spent a full summer waking up by myself at 5:00-5:30 every day and was never tired, but it did involve going to sleep when I became tired for the day, whether that meant 9PM or whether that meant 2AM. Perhaps a satisfying sleep schedule is the Holy Grail of the college student’s life, but even so the tightly regulated sleep schedule is probably an industrial imposition.

On the plus side, I wake up in time to get to my classes, and this little black box is neither a new piece of plastic, or anything to rub my food into, and is it very durable. This particular clock has been in the family for at least twelve years, and will be sticking around until further notice…

Beyond that, my contact lenses are made of plastic and their spectacle sisters are too. My prescription is so high that without super-thinning plastic lenses, the glass equivalent would probably mangle my face with about an inch of glass on either side. So far as the frame goes, I have a slight nickel allergy, so most metals are out of the question and titanium is expensive.

Come to think of it, just about any medical product I have ever bought in the US uses a plastic, whether it’s in the jars, the “safety seals” or the body of the tool itself. One can enjoy most prescriptions without the little personal plastic jars, but the pharmacy itself stores the drugs in plastic. Many pharmacists will happily put your prescription in a (glass, if you want) jar you provide, so long as they are able to affix the proper label to it.

The default, of course, is the complementary little jar (usually plastic No. 5), and there is no contemporary apothecary that offers things like ibuprofen in open bulk. Over this idea, I don’t disagree with the screaming Very Bad Idea sign, but I think after modifications, it is still a feasible model. Instead of pre-packaging the aspirin of 100ct to a bottle… which is sometimes put inside a cardboard box… whose cardboard boxes are then lashed together with copious amounts of plastic wrap when they are freighted to the store… we could just have more pharmacists and counters that dole out the OTC drugs.

There are more problems with that than the actual drug-consumer interaction, and most of them have to do with distribution as having a strong economic and cultural connotation. Because they are sealed by a plant with strict quality control procedures, there is an illusion of an increased safety that comes with it… yet people still go to the actual pharmacist to get prescriptions which aren’t individually packaged and sealed by a giant industrial ghost. Another thing: packaging like this allows drugs to be readily available for purchase everywhere from gas stations to supermarkets. I think it’s partly because of their ubiquitous availability that they get as much use as they do.

People (self guilty as charged) can fall into the habit of forgetting that a drug is a collection of manufactured chemicals that are fed into a complex system to hopefully produce a given set of results… But “headache ergo Advil” isn’t the whole story. Using OTC drugs often, over long periods of time, has been linked to a number of gastro-intestinal problems and rivers of undigested drugs and manufactured vitamins trickle that their way through water treatment plants into waterways…

The Plastics Challenge has caused me a little distress. As I continued to think about alternatives to plasticy things and the standards that brought them into my life in the first place, I kept coming to three conclusions:

1. Going non-plastic all at once is sort of a silly adventure to undertake, like immersing yourself for a day in an society with a language you don’t know, or stumbling around a for day without the glasses you’ve been wearing since you could remember. To make it a one-day thing with lots of unsustainable fuss and effort is not helpful in the long run (long run here meaning a very ambitious “longer than a day”).
2. Transitioning away has to be done gradually both because alternatives are expensive either in monetary terms or in terms of ingenuity. Either they don’t exist for purchase or they do but have incurred a penalty of price for being “special”.
3. To think of all plastic things as superfluous and wicked is just not feasible for a lot of things, like medical supplies, electronics, and communication tools. Our shoes and socks don’t “need” to be made of plastics, but we had better have plastic helmets; not having a digital communication device re-casts and limits (changes?) someone’s role in a society that currently /is/ dominated by the principle of networks whose medium cannot exist without some plastic, for better or worse.

(By the way, many other people mentioned tooth brushing; the “cleanliness” of a mouth and the rate of plaque accumulation and enamel distress actually as about as much to do with what one eats than with daily brushing, which is more cosmetic than anything else. High sugar, high fat, and high starch diets cause grosser teeth; plant-heavy diets with things like celery, carrots, bok choy, etc. and very lean meats do not cause nearly as much trouble in this arena.)

All in all, the modifications I made were continuations of what I have tried to do for months. Yes, plastic-free is “possible”, but perhaps it’s more useful to consider plastics as separate types and categories. The easiest to cut out are the quick disposables. Second easiest are the storage containers and clothing items. By the time we get to clocks, computers, and contact lenses, I’m afraid I have to stick with the plastic.