I never thought the issue of plastic pollution and my pregnancy would be spoken in the same sentence, and yet they are. I remember my first ultrasound scan. Seeing this little human-shaped shadow doing somersaults across the screen. The sonographer was giggling to herself the whole time. She told us our hyperactive little person had made her day.
Up until that point, I’d been pretty emotionally detached about the baby growing inside my body. Unlike my partner, I still didn’t know if I actually wanted children. Being in my mid-thirties, I’d left it up to fate to decide whether I’d get pregnant and whether the pregnancy would be successful. But meeting this new, living, cartwheeling little person on the scan for the first time changed things. I felt a deep protectiveness that I never knew I was capable of.
I’d ridden my bike to the scan and had booked into a gym class afterwards. I was carrying on my life as if nothing had changed but, in that moment, everything felt different. I chose to walk to the gym instead, anxious that I might fall off my bike and harm the new little life inside me. I had a deep sense that what I did with my body wasn’t just affecting me anymore.
That anxiety would follow me through the pregnancy and would grow especially strong in the first six months post-partum – a normal biological response to having a newborn but, unfortunately, one that still doesn’t get enough support. One of the things that became a persistent focus of my worries was plastic. I had read that plastic is so pervasive that it’s turning up in pregnant people’s placentas. I remember becoming particularly concerned about chopping things on plastic cutting boards.
We did a lot to reduce our plastic consumption. We bought all the pantry stores we could from a refillery, saving and re-using as many large glass jars as we could to lug them to the refill shop once a month. We ordered organic vegetables, delivered without plastic packaging, once a week. We bought bread from a bakery. We cooked almost everything we ate from scratch. As we prepared for our new baby, we filtered through the hand-me-down clothes and linens, keeping everything made with natural fibres and declining the polyester stuff.
When the little one finally arrived, it was a big adjustment. It was in the middle of the 2021 lockdown and we were on our own, with all of our family members half a world away – unable to come and support us. We were lucky to have an amazing network of friends and colleagues who kept us well fed for the first month of parenthood, delivering meals without breaking our Covid bubble.
I had intended to exclusively breastfeed but, after the first week, our midwife was very worried about how quickly our baby was losing weight. Despite my best efforts (including a grueling programme from a lactation consultant that I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy), I discovered – like my mother and sister before me – that the ability to exclusively breastfeed is not encoded into my DNA. That is a topic for another day but, if anyone reading this has experienced the same thing, I just want you to know that it is totally normal and totally OK. It’s something I needed to hear when I was going through it.
We started mix-feeding our baby and soon realised that, despite what was written on the packaging, the glass bottles we’d bought before she arrived were not suitable for a tiny newborn. Our midwife instructed us to go out and buy a different brand of (plastic) bottles. In the fog of exhaustion, sleep deprivation and recovery, there is little scope for comparing brands. We asked a friend to go out and buy the bottles our midwife recommended.
With such a pure and new little person, I worried a lot about all the toxic things she was being exposed to and the plastic bottles certainly didn’t help. But I also knew that, even if I could exclusively breastfeed, microplastic has been found in breastmilk too. When plastic is literally in the air we breathe and the water we drink, you realise that the situation is at a point where it’s beyond our individual abilities to control. You can reduce your own plastic use but you are still exposed. Because plastic pollution is not an individual problem – it is a systemic one.
It reminds me of a time when I was in my early 20s, just starting my journey of environmentalism. I went to a supermarket to do my weekly shop and remember feeling completely paralysed at the door. Because I realised that, no matter what I bought, it would inflict some kind of harm on someone or something. Whether that was the plastic packaging or animal welfare impacts or food miles or unfair trade rules. There was no way to do a weekly shop without creating some kind of harm in the process.
Leaving it up to our individual consciences to choose an ethical option every time we make a purchase is exhausting. And it’s incredibly convenient for the companies that directly cause the pollution or the animal welfare abuses or the unjust working conditions. Because it means they can carry on being unethical and leave it up to us as individuals to decide whether or not to be part of that. Just 20 companies are responsible for producing more than half of all the “throwaway” single-use plastic that ends up as waste worldwide. Similarly, just 100 companies are responsible for nearly three-a quarters of all climate heating emissions.
Standing in that supermarket, I remember wondering why the choice was mine? Why were companies allowed to carry on like this and leave it up to shoppers to decide whether or not to cause harm? Why weren’t there regulations to prevent companies from prioritising their profits over nature, over other living things?
No one person can carry the weight of all that harm on their shoulders each time they make a choice. It leaves us overwhelmed and exhausted. And, despite our best efforts, many of us give in to cognitive dissonance, choosing to ignore what we know to be true.
That’s about the time I started to get more involved in environmental activism. And one of the most wonderful things that came with it was that I no longer felt so alone or so helpless. In my experience, being an ethical consumer is incredibly lonely. But being part of a movement for change feels inspiring and empowering. And it can give you the energy to keep making those ethical choices.
I remember when we won the ban on plastic bags. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine that we even had those flimsy little free plastic bags in supermarkets – but we did. And getting rid of them certainly wasn’t a given. There were all sorts of arguments put forward for why we couldn’t possibly ban plastic bags. But, within a matter of months of the ban, it felt completely normal. And now around a billion plastic bags are being kept out of the ocean, out of landfills, out of the environment each year.
That is what systemic change looks like. When the green choice is the default. When it’s not up to each individual person to choose to be ethical every time they do the weekly shop.
We can do the same thing for plastic bottles. They are one of the most pervasive pieces of plastic pollution in Aotearoa New Zealand – and they are also one of the most easily replaced. In Aotearoa, around 1 billion bottles are being sold each year. And just 9% of all plastic ever produced has been recycled.
Many people will remember when milk, beer and soft drinks came in reusable glass bottles. It’s tried and tested and it works. What’s needed is systemic change – for the Government to invest in the infrastructure to bring back beverage refill systems and to ban single use plastic bottles – just like how they banned single use plastic bags.
And the beautiful thing about going back to refillable bottles is that it can pave the way for all sorts of refillable food containers. Once you have the infrastructure in place for beverages, it will be so much easier to bring in refillable systems for other products too.
By coming together as a movement of voices, we have had so many victories. The plastic bag ban is only one of the most memorable. Together, we ended new offshore oil and gas exploration in the seas of Aotearoa. We won a Global Ocean Treaty that will pave the way for placing a third of the world’s oceans into protected areas. I am confident that, by standing together as one voice demanding systemic change, we will win a ban on single-use plastic bottles. And when we do, we will create a cleaner and safer world for our children and theirs.
Call on the NZ Government to ban unnecessary single-use plastic bottles* in NZ, and to incentivise reusable and refillable alternatives.
