Paper or Plastic: Searching for Solutions to an Overpackaged World
2005, Watershed Media/Sierra Club Books
Foreword by Randy Hayes
This was the final installment in Watershed Media’s Wood Reduction Trilogy. The simple supermarket choice echoed in the book’s title epitomizes the dilemma of a society on a collision course with the planet’s life-support systems. Up to one-third of America’s municipal solid waste — now over 1,700 pounds per person each year— is packaging. The “upstream” costs in energy and resources used to make packaging are even more alarming. I painstakingly unwrapped the packaging problem to give consumers, product designers, and policymakers the information they need to take steps toward a more sustainable future. This book was instrumental in the City of San Francisco’s groundbreaking zero waste policy and plastic shopping bag ban. While the statistics on packaging waste have only gotten dramatically worse, the analysis remains remarkably on point. Paper or Plastic received a 2006 IPPY Award in the Environment/Ecology/Nature category.