Since the beginning of this campaign, I have been looking for ways to get rid of single-use plastic items. This single-use or one-time use plastic items are used only once before they are thrown away or recycled. These are things like plastic bags, straws, coffee stirrers, soda and water bottles and most food packaging.?
One such product is a pizza saver, the triangular table-like thing that keeps the lid of the box from touching your pizza and the toppings.
So, given our love for pizza's, can you imagine how many pizzas are ordered every day and how many plastic pizza savers are thrown away? It might just take a day, even less to make these savers, but they stick around in the environment for over 1,000 years. We produce roughly 300 million tons of plastic each year and half of it is disposable - so can you tell where it is coming from?
In particular, can we not look for other alternatives for this? Add a paper sheet at the top, hold the edges through a cardboard stand? I am not sure what can be done, but all I know is that there are other alternatives we need to explore.?
The nature of petroleum-based disposable plastic makes it impossible to recycle and have to be processed with new materials and chemicals to do so. Anyhow, there is a very limited list of things that are made from recycled plastic, so all in all, we incur a loss by using these items. In an ideal scenario, we should not be using single-use plastic at all and finding newer and better ways to eradicate it out of our system.
The realization that pizzas can be served without the saver was a huge surprise for me. At the beginning of my campaign, I reached out to Dominos India and asked them if they were planning to ditch this saver, but I am yet to hear from them.
Don't you it would be amazing if every global brand took the responsibility of redoing things in a way that would help the environment??