It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important.
You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power,
may not be in your time,
that there’ll be any fruit.
But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing.
You may never know what results come from your action.
But if you do nothing, there will be no result.
~ Mahatma Gandhi

- See more at: http://myplasticfreelife.com/2014/02/is-it-cheating-to-stock-up-on-resta...

After a talk this week by Jon Young, I walked my bike to the subway with a client wh is becoming a friend. She told me what an inspiration I was to her and what about me had helped her change to a life less plastic. I thought about your column on that, Beth. She said that seeing me make choices inspired her. I thought that making those options available to others made a difference (teaching, selling alternatives to plastics, refilling body care products etc.

As a seller of bulk things, it is the exception to receive bulk items NOT wrapped in plastic. It is telling that I can name what I didn't receive in plastic (even if it was inside a cardboard box): soap nuts that I negotiated to send me in a burlap sack which I had to send her, paper-wrapped toilet paper, and African Black Soap which came delightfully wrapped in kraft paper inside a cardboard box. Glass bottles? In #4 plastic. Except for the case packs directly from the manufacturer come to think of it! Ceramic filters? In plastic. Stainless Steel Lunch boxes? In plastic. Glass jars? In that super useless filmy plastic that's always broken open anyhow. But zinc oxide, salts and baking soda are in double walled paper. That the supplier then wraps in ultra thin plastic.

I've had requests to not package in plastic from suppliers go horribly wrong. One family business that makes totally not plastic items told me I was forcing her to be more wasteful by not wanting each item separately zip lock bagged. To prove her point, she uses crap loads of bubble wrap that she tells me she had to buy new. Another supplier responded to my request to reduce the plastic wrapping by putting my hundreds of glass jars in filmy ultra thing plastic bags and dumping them in giant overweight boxes with some packing peanuts. So unpacking these is a dangerous mess of reaching into the packing peanuts and picking out broken glass. It's awful, and I am sure they are packing this stupidly just to punish me for asking. Of course, the breakage is my fault because I requested low plastic.

So on that Mercury Retrograde inspired note, I want to conclude that I agree: we do our best, we aim to consume less, and if everyone else got on board, we might be able to turn things around. Buying from bulk bins doesn't mean NO plastic, but it means the plastic burden is shared with many. That's better.

The future depends on what you do today.
― Mahatma Gandhi