REVIEWING MY PLASTIC-FREE JULY 2020
July is best known for Plastic-free July commitment which is taken as a challenge by millions of people. In the year 2019, there were 250 million people who took part in this. Last year, I was unable to take part in this as I was not having enough knowledge about this. But this year, thankfully I was able to take part in this and was able to minimize the waste produced on a family basis meaning that my whole family including my both mom and dad also, both my sisters reduced the use of plastic this month. For many people, this may be a new concept so I wanted to explain that and this will be followed by a review of my family's plastic-free July which will be further followed by my future plans related to my environmental friendly life and also blogs and social media. So, let us get started.
WHAT IS PLASTIC FREE JULY?
Plastic-free July is organised every year by Australia based organisation Plastic-Free Foundation. The main intention of there is to let people think about plastic and think about how they can avoid the use of single-use plastic for just 31 days. It helps people to rethink their relationship with plastic and think about how they can avoid it. There are many ways of this but most of the time we don't think about this. Some of the ways can be used of stainless steel cutlery, using cloth bag, etc. This challenge is taken by many people around the globe and so, this year I did that too.
MY PLASTIC FREE JULY
I didn't expect much from this time as I thought I will be unable to do this but losing hope is not an option in my list so, hoping for best is always the best thing. And my hopes showed the true colour and we minimized our waste up to 90-95%. This is one of the biggest achievement this year and I hope that I will do keizen (constant improvement) and my next year's plastic-free July will be much better than this year's.
MY PLANS & PLANNER
There was a lot that I need to do before I step into plastic-free July and fortunately, I was able to do all things I thought of. one such thing from this list was to monitor the plastic intake of our family which I started to do from June itself. One thing I am obsessed with is using of planners whether it is in my day to day life or in this case, I used the planner given on package free's Instagram handle. Which is shown below.
This planner helped me a lot to take care of my plastic-free July and surely next year I will follow the same.
PREVIOUSLY MADE SWAPS
In May 2019, after I came to know about this kind of living I started buying amazing products. Most of them are the one that I take to school and I enjoyed a lot working with them. But now, in these times, I was unable to go out of my house, but one thing I used the most in July and that was my pen. I bought two fountain pens last year and I used them a lot in July to do my school work.
NEW THINGS THAT CAME ALONG THE WAY
As I mentioned earlier that I didn't think that my plastic-free July will go great but I was wrong it went great. One such reason for this was that my dad started composting. Earlier I didn't know about it but after it all started, we minimized our waste to about 90 per cent. That was because, most of the time when I use to put trash in the dustbin I was astonished to see that our trash consisted of food waste the most but now as we started composting on our rooftop, there has been a lot of change. We also planned for plantation but then due to some reasons, we were unable to do that in July and hopefully, we will do this in this month or maybe the next.
FAULTS
This month although we as a family try to minimize our waste there was a bit of conflict in my eating habits because in this month I ate a lot of biscuits and chocolates, two things I can't stop eating. I know that this generates plastic but I love those two things. Also, we drink no coffee but we do drink tea. And due to COVID 19, we are unable to get tea in bulk. That is why we drank tea which came in packets.
BEING ENVIRONMENTALIST
I can say that this month I have been a little bit different. That is because if you follow me on social media you might know that I was active in there protest against EIA ( Environment Impact Assessments) 2020. We organised so many tweetstorms in the month of July and August and this marked my active participation as Environmentalist until now.
Know more about EIA 2020 by seeing the following video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWCjhj035WY&t=318s
Some screenshots of the twitter trends are down below:
That is all about my plastic-free July. What about your plastic-free July? Feel free to comment down below. At last, hope you remain safe. Bye!