green is universal

Sticking a Fork Into Sticking a Fork In It

Posted at 06:34 PM on January 08, 2008 comments (0)

By Siobhan Adcock, iVillage.com

I've eaten lunch at my desk every working weekday for about, oh, 10 years now. Partly that's because I'm busy, but mostly it's due to a lack of imagination on my part - I do have co-workers who manage to take their takeout...out...somewhere. Anyway, one day not long after helping to launch the iGo Green mini-channel on iVillage (Irony Alert), I looked into my post-lunch trashcan and thought, Jeez. I've used three plastic spoons today. And I just threw them all in the trash. How did that happen?

Here's how it happened.

Plastic Spoon 1: Oatmeal for breakfast. (Once you start eating lunch at your desk every day, it's a slippery slope to eating all your other meals there too.)

Plastic Spoon 2: Soup for lunch. (Which, at least, I made using veggies I got from the CSA I belong to. If you don't currently participate in a CSA program, Blog Reader, join one, like, immediately. For real. The veggies, they're delicious. They're so much tastier than the mass-farmed stuff you get at the grocery store. Trust me.)

Plastic Spoon 3: Yogurt for lunch. (I did not want to use the same spoon I used for my tomatoey soup in my apricotty yogurt. You know how that is.)

This kind of behavior, of course, is exactly where dismaying statistics like these come from:

- Disposable-lunch eaters create up to 100 pounds of garbage per person per year.
- The average American creates 90,000 pounds of garbage over the course of his or her lifetime.
- The average American produces about twice as much trash every day as the average American did in 1960.

So there I was, eating my CSA-veggie soup and feeling all proud of myself for working on all this eco-conscious Interweb content, and meanwhile... I'm throwing away about ten boxes of disposable plastic spoons every year - not even recycling them (not that our office appears to recycle anything anyway). And that's just spoons - what about all the plastic forks I've tossed for salads, and macaroni and cheese, and... um... salads?

I realized I'd been doing something crazy and stupid. And I was looking right at one of those fabled little changes that I could make right then and there, that would actually make a big difference.

So, I got two sets of these adorable re-usable bamboo utensils and stashed them in my desk drawer. I use them every day instead of burning through a box of plastic spoons a month. I don't pick up plastic forks when I get takeout salads, and I ask cashiers not to give me utensils either.

And maybe, if I keep at it for another ten years, I'll burn off some of my bad Plastic Fork Karma. I hope so, anyway.

Siobhan Adcock
iVillage, Senior Producer - Network & Social Media
http://www.iVillage.com