Out whole system is set up to make it crazy hard. I drink a lot of soda water, and despite what they’d have you believe, aluminum cans are lined with single use plastic. While the aluminum is recyclable, the plastic liner is not. I’ve been carbonating my own water at home to reduce the amount of cans I go through. Glass bottles aren’t much better. In America, at least, they aren’t reused, they are recycled, which involves melting them down at a large energy cost (probably more than the energy cost of making a single use plastic bottle).

I think my main cause of single use plastics is just food packaging. I try to avoid any of the really processed foods that are packaged in plastic. Obviously, I’m no better at this than anyone else, but I at least try to buy ingredients to make my own food. Every loaf of bread I bake is a single use bag I don’t buy.

I also get a good portion of my produce from my own garden, or from a local farm, and that’s all plastic free.

I’m always wary of products that try to do “plastic-free” by switching to a cardboard/paper material, cause if they are a package that needs to be water/air tight, they are going to be coated with some kind of plastic or other petrochemical product. Maybe it actually cuts down on the total amount of plastic, but it might just be greenwashing.