NOTHING TO WASTE

As the pandemic began to ease in spring 2021, Bill and I sat on the large patio of the Coop in Lafayette enjoying a glass of iced tea and a salad. We felt a little uncertain about being too close to other people, but the day was lovely and few people occupied other tables. The server came by with a small cup of paper-wrapped sweeteners and put the cup on the table. When we finished our meal, she began clearing the table. She grabbed the small cup, tossed it on her tray, and exclaimed, "We have so much waste here now. Everything we put on the table has to be thrown out." I wasn't quick enough to ask if the restaurant recycled or composted, nor did I take the sweeteners home, but I thought of how many small ways the pandemic changed us, especially long-held patterns of behavior. All of us became more aware of what we carried or threw away.

The pandemic cleared the skies for a while with carbon emissions down, but plastic bags and brown paper bags proliferated because customers were no longer allowed to bring in their own reusable bags. Unwilling to go out in public, we ordered online and created stacks of cardboard boxes used only once for home deliveries. The throwaway masks that we adopted could be found dropped on the street, clinging to bushes, or worse, caught in birds' claws or around their necks. Two years later, the pandemic for the most part is a thing of the past, masks have disappeared, and the lessons we learned along with them. Instead, we have come out of the pandemic often more angry and less civil with each other. I think of the cars that now race around others on the freeways, swerving either in back or in front of another vehicle, too close to stop if something unexpected happens.

In our return to hurried lives, I often wonder what I could do as one person to make changes in the way we live. I discovered two people, Gloria Majiga-Kamoto of Malawi and Sharon Lavigne of the United States, two winners of the 2021 Goldman Environmental Awards, who created movements against the use of disposable plastic products in their countries. Majiga-Kamoto works to ban the production, importation, distribution, and use of thin (one-use) plastics in Malawi. Lavigne stopped the construction of a plastics manufacturing plant near the Mississippi River in Louisiana.

They both showed me what one person can do. Even small actions at home, like making sure our recyclables bin is filled with recyclables and not trash, matter. As we have prepped our house for sale, we have found local businesses that help keep our usable stuff we no longer need out of landfills by either selling, donating, or taking articles apart for recycling. As an artist, I continue to repurpose materials that have been used in other places or are leftovers in my mixed media artwork. I am glad to see other people devise creative ways and new opportunities for those who continue to think of our longterm future.

Read about the Goldman Environmental Awards winners here:

https://www.goldmanprize.org/all-winners/