Kitchen Warriors

An anti-plastic brigade is cooking their way out of the climate crisis

Photo by Andrea Strong

A few years ago, Dani Schuller started cooking. Not just dinner for her family, or packed lunch for work, or the occasional fruit pie. Anything she would have purchased in a package, she began making from scratch — cream cheese, yogurt, crackers, “Oreo” cookies, loaves of bread, chicken nuggets, even chocolate syrup.

She did this not because she was a particularly passionate home cook. She did it because of plastic. She did it because recycling is a myth. She’s part of a nationwide movement of climate change activists fighting the battle from their kitchens.

Of all the plastic trash we make — and we’ve made 8.3 billion metric tons of it so far — only about 9 percent of current plastic waste is recycled. Twelve percent is incinerated, which is not particularly great for air quality or health because more than 99 percent of plastic is derived from oil, natural gas, and coal. And because its destruction by incineration also uses fossil fuels, environmental groups now recognize plastic as a major contributor to climate change.

The rest of that plastic waste — 79 percent — ends up in landfills, mostly in developing nations, where it can take 500 to 1,000 years to degrade. Every year, 13 million metric tons of plastic arrive in landfills, 8 million metric tons of which end up getting washed into rivers, lakes, and the ocean, where it’s often consumed by sea life and sea birds.

If present trends continue, by 2050, there will be 12 billion metric tons of plastic in landfills. For context, that’s 35,000 times as heavy as the Empire State Building.

Plastics are not just bad for the environment; they’re not particularly good for people either. “Plastics can affect health in a number of ways,” said Jeffrey A. Morrison, a practicing physician with more than 15 years of experience focusing on environmental influences on health. “One way is due to plasticizers — dangerous chemicals like BPA and phthalates — which are added to plastics to make them more pliable and translucent, and then leach into our water, food, and through our skin, he said.

In 2004, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that BPA was found in 93 percent…