It’s Plastic Free July: What can you do to reduce your plastic consumption?
by Susie Hairston
We are about 3/4 of the way through Plastic Free July. It is both a month of action and a movement started to get individuals to make small changes in order to reduce their use of single-use plastics. Social media posts and articles on what you can do to cut back on your plastic use during July and beyond are everywhere. Many people who are concerned about plastic pollution have already implemented the much touted standard go-tos of “bring a reusable water bottle and a reusable bag with you everywhere,” but at this point, that is really not enough, as over 380 million metric tons of plastic is produced each year, at least half of which is single-use. We need and are ready to do more. So what is next?
You could move on to switching other things you use daily to a plastic free version — buy shampoo bars and soap bars in paper or cardboard packaging rather than liquid versions in plastic containers. Buy laundry tablets that come in a paper packet (beware: most laundry sheets, though they come in non-plastic packaging actually have plastics in them) Buy deodorant in a cardboard dispenser rather than a plastic one. You could pick one plastic-packaged item that you purchase weekly at the grocery store and find a version of it that is in glass or cardboard or can be gotten from the bulk bins and put in our own reusable container, and purchase that instead.
But plastics are everywhere! To date, only 9% of all plastics produced have been recycled. Approximately 79% of all the plastics ever produced still persists — either in use or in a landfill. An estimated 12% have been destroyed through incineration. Since plastics do not biodegrade, but instead break down into smaller and smaller plastics, microplastics, and nanoplastics which are in every place on earth – from Antarctic ice to the deepest ocean trench and everywhere in between. They are in plants and animals. And they are in us — we inhale them from the air, eat them in our food, drink them in our water, and absorb the toxic chemicals in them through our skin.
And plastic production is toxic — from the extraction to the transit to the use to the disposal/recycling of it. At every stage, making plastics harms people, our environment., and the other beings we share this planet with. When you use it, microplastics shed — wear your polyester workout wear and fill the air in your workout space with microplastics that you are then breathing; wash it, and send hundreds of thousands of microplastics to the wastewater treatment plant so they can be released into our waterways and end up in sewage sludge spread on our land. Drink out of a plastic water bottle, and you are drinking hundreds of thousands of plastic particles. Chop your food on a plastic cutting board, and you are peppering your food with microplastics.
Increasingly studies are finding that plastics in our bodies and the chemicals they contain are associated with endocrine disruption, heart disease, cancer, and dementia.
So let’s start with the plastic reduction steps you can take to have the most impact on your personal health. All plastics contain a variety of chemicals that alter the properties of plastics — make them more flexible, change their color, etc; and these chemicals can leach out into your food. Many of these chemicals can cause endocrine disruption, cancer, and neurological problems. Ideally, to be on the safe side, we would avoid plastic contacting our food at all – but given the ubiquity of plastic packaging, that is almost impossible to do. Here are some doable choices that will make a big impact.
- Never get food in polystyrene/styrofoam take out containers or drinks in styrofoam cups. Polystyrene leaches styrene, a suspected human carcinogen.
- Stop using black plastic kitchen tools such as spatulas and food containers. Black plastic is often made from recycled electronics, which can contain high levels of toxic flame retardants and heavy metals, which are linked to serious health issues, including cancer, hormone disruption, infertility, and neurological or developmental harm.
- Avoid using Plastic #7 (Polycarbonate), which is often used in reusable plastic water bottles and food storage containers, as it often contains BPA, an endocrine disruptor that has been linked to reproductive issues, childhood developmental and behavioral problems, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers.
- Stop cooking with Teflon pans.
- Stop storing food in plastic containers.
- Don’t drink out of paper take-out coffee cups — the vast majority of them are lined with plastic.
All of the things above are things you can do by yourself, individually, but when done collectively, can make a larger societal impact. Just look at what Plastic Free July has accomplished since its founding in Australia in 2011 as a grassroots movement of 40 people. It has inspired over 170 million participants in 190 countries. 170 million people refusing to use at least one single-use plastic item that they used to use regularly results in a large reduction in plastic use. In 2025 across the globe, participants reduced non-recoverable (landfill) waste by 1.4 million metric tons, recyclable waste by 900,000 metric tons, and plastic consumption by 290,000 metric tons. In the past seven years participants have together avoided 15 million metric tons of plastic waste.
So besides acting collectively with others to reduce our single-use plastic use during Plastic Free July, what can we do to have a larger impact on our plastics problem, which will ultimately protect our personal health as well? Plastic Free July has a big impact because it has become a fixture in many people’s lives— people across the world are now habituated to the fact that in July each of us will take another action to reduce our use of single use plastics just like we get dressed every morning. The consistency of 15 years of the campaign has made it normal part of our routine. Plastic Free July is also successful because it is a collective action, and we can help with that.
Make your own pledge, but bring your friends, your relatives, your neighborhood along with you. Just like friends bond together to exercise every day to inspire each other to keep going, you can make pacts with your friends to take action to step by step eliminate plastic from your lives.
You can go beyond just your small friend group, but bring them along to encourage a local restaurant you all frequent to eliminate the use of styrofoam take-out containers and cups. Start a petition asking your local grocery store to stop offering plastic bags at check-out. Organize with the parents at your child’s school to stop using styrofoam trays. Businesses care about customer satisfaction. If enough people make their preferences known, change will occur.
Go bigger and organize to ask larger corporations with more reach and impact to eliminate plastics from their products and packaging. You could go to Coca Cola and say that you would like them to try a reuse pilot program in your area like the successful glass bottle return and reuse program with over 100 restaurants they did in El Paso Texas. Coca Cola has done it before, and with pressure, they can keep expanding reuse programs everywhere. Consistent and organized consumer pressure can and does work. Just look at the changes Amazon has made. It used to be that those blue and white plastic bubble mailers were on every doorstep in the neighborhood, and boxed items contained plastic air pillows and plastic bubble wrap. Now most mailers in our area are brown paper and the boxes contain twists of brown paper as packing material rather than plastic. This sea change happened because of petitions signed by thousands, activist pressure, customer complaints, and shareholder resolutions. In 2024, 56% of Amazon’s fulfillment centers used no plastic delivery packaging, and 37% of its shipments in North American contained single-use plastic delivery packaging, down from 65% in 2023.
Amazon has made strides thanks to a lot of people coming together from different angles to pressure them. But they still have work to do. In 2024, despite their reduction in plastic packaging use, Amazon still produced 74,137 metric tons of plastic packaging waste. One easy thing you can do right now, today, is to sign on to this petition asking Amazon to stop using plastic packaging. In the comments, you might want to thank them for the reductions they have already made, but tell them you want them to make more. It also helps to let them know you are a customer, if you are.
After you’ve done that, figure out what your next action is going to be to eliminate plastic in your life/our world, and take it.
Resources and references:
https://plasticfreefoundation.
https://www.cspi.org/cspi-
https://www.earthday.org/12-
https://www.plasticfreejuly.
https://www.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/