Reduce, Reuse, Refuse: Tips To Cut down Plastic Use in Your Kitchen

Every year, we dump 10m tons of plastic into the ocean, and solving the problem will require regulatory action. But there are ways consumers can help

Cutting boards, non-stick pans, mixing bowls, even tea bags: in the kitchen, plastics can be hidden in plain sight.

It’s something that Jessica Brinkworth, an anthropology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, realized once she began looking for ways to cut down on plastic use in her own kitchen after her workplace started doing the same. Although much of her lab’s waste was unavoidable – plastics are key for the sterile medical research they conduct – it still made her uncomfortable. That discomfort was only magnified in her own home, where she knew plastics were “largely a matter of convenience”.

“Large macroplastics are a problem worldwide because we dump them on the shores of other nations,” she says, where things like plastic bottles block access to food for coastal nations and kill about a million people a year due to flooding, landslides and other environmental disasters. Much smaller plastics, like micro and nanoplastics, which are tinier than a grain of rice, “pose a whole other level of problem. Many types of plastic are endocrine disruptors,” meaning they disrupt the excretion and use of insulin, which can lead to obesity and reproductive health disorders.