This post is not van living related, but I hope the same audience will be interested in this important topic as well.
For my New Year’s resolution this year I decided to attempt to avoid the use of all disposable items. I gave myself a few ground rules–I could use recyclable disposable items only if I personally saw that they were recycled, I could use disposable items if they would be disposed of regardless (ex. straws and napkins automatically provided at restaurants), packaging wouldn’t count (nearly impossible to avoid), and finally I would not inconvenience others (ex. not refusing disposable dishes, etc. while a guest). I won’t pretend that I have stuck to this objective perfectly, but it has been extremely eye-opening. The primary thing I have taken away from this experiment was that due to the above (I think pretty reasonable ground rules) I still found myself using a large amount of disposables. Why? Because our societal approach to the world is a disposable one and without making myself a non-functional part of that society it is next to impossible to remove these items from my life. This problem is bigger than individual irresponsibility–our basic infrastructure has a fundamentally problematic approach to consumption and until we alter that there is little hope for change on a grand scale. We need to see a societal shift in how we view and approach the world and its resources. This experiment has been extremely discouraging because I quickly discovered that disposable items/materials are so pervasive and so integral to our society that they are in all practicality impossible to avoid. I want to walk you through an average american day highlighting the types of disposable items that permeate our everyday life.
You wake up in the morning and blow your stuffy nose with a tissue, then head to the bathroom and use some toilet paper. You pick up your toothbrush to brush your teeth, and then use a paper cup to rinse with mouth wash. You clean your ears with a q-tip, you shave your face/legs with a plastic razor. Head downstairs and make some breakfast. You pack your kids’ lunches with plastic baggies, napkins, plastic utensils, and organic juice boxes. You wipe up a spill with a paper towel. You stop at a coffee shop where you get coffee in a paper cup, and a bottle of water, use some sugar packets stirred in with stir stick, grab some napkins to go.
Lunch time you go to Chipotle where you have a burrito wrapped in paper, use plastic utensils, a plastic cup, and napkins. At work you use pens to write on sticky notes. You buy a bottle of soda and some cookies in plastic packaging from a vending machine for a snack. You toss the empty bottle in a recycling bin that you fail to notice is filled with trash (no way its going to a recycling facility).
You stop at the grocery store and everything you buy is packaged. At home again you wash your dishes with a sponge, dust with paper towels, clean your floors with a disposable wipe. You make a lasagna in a one-time-use aluminum pan. You set the table with napkins. After dinner you change your baby’s diaper and use baby wipes. Getting ready for bed you remove makeup removing wipes. 
Do you see how pervasive this is? So many things that we think of as necessities due to either convenience or hygiene. Unfortunately, due to the affluence we experience in the US, we treat most of our possessions as disposable (even though they don’t technically fall under that label). Electronics, clothes, old toys, lawn accessories, and organic waste are all things which we might not think of as disposable, but they end up in landfills rather sooner than later. Most people in the US claim to care about the environment and want to see changes happen. We jump on a chance to buy notebooks and pencils made from “recycled materials.” We dutifully (maybe) put our bottles and cans in recycling bins which may or may not actually get recycled and feel like the sins of our consumerism are absolved. But we don’t think for a second about the countless disposable cups, plates, napkins, straws, razors, tissues, etc, that we are continually throwing away. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency the average individual produces 4.38 pounds of waste per day. Only a little over a quarter (1.51 lbs) of that gets recycled or composted. That is a lot of waste. That means that the average American contributes around one ton of trash per year to landfills or 164 million tons of trash per year as a nation. That is staggering.
We need to begin rethinking our approach to our consumption of resources and how we can do it in a responsible manner that reduces harm to our planet and especially the less fortunate of the world (who are the most affected by our irresponsibility).Part of this is awareness. Awareness of the quantity of waste we produce and of the consequences of the waste.
Landfills are one of the most obvious of our problems, though some continue to deny the seriousness of the issue. These vast expanses of waste are pushed off on low income communities (including exporting unwanted garbage to 3rd world countries) who can’t afford to fight them. Numerous studies have shown the negative affects of living near landfills due to leaching (which is often hard to detect due to the frequent location of landfills next to bodies of water which disperse the toxic pollutants). Organic materials (we only compost 50% or less of our organic waste) either decomposes anaerobically (due to a lack of oxygen) and releases methane gas (a worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) or simply does not fully decompose. Regardless of whether you think there is enough space in the world for all of these massive landfills, the fact of the matter is that we are taking massive quantities of valuable natural resources, whether those be organic materials, metals, or petroleum based products and cut them off from the natural cycle of life (and if they are re-entering they are doing so in harmful, toxic ways).
But we have recycling, right? And that means that as long as we recycle we aren’t doing any of this harm. Recycling is certainly better than not recycling–both economically and environmentally it is more prudent than sending to landfills. However, that doesn’t mean it eliminates the use of valuable resources and energy or the production of pollutants. Every time we recycle we lose in the process–versus if we made long lasting products and put up with minor inconveniences such as carrying around our own water bottles. And that is is if our recyclables actually get recycled. 
I dutifully recycled in college only to find that most of the time the recyclables went to the dumpster because of the garbage mixed in. I know the recycling at my current job almost always goes in the dumpster because people are too careless to sort out their trash. Often our would-be recyclables not only don’t end up recycled, but end up as litter on the side of the road, floating in the ocean, or in the stomachs of birds.
Two major things need to happen in order for us to make real changes in this dangerous and rapidly escalating cycle we have entered into. The first is a societal change of perspective. We need to cease being consumers of the world and become part of it again. 
We need to give and take rather than just devour. We need to plan 15 extra minutes into our day so we can sit down in our local coffee shop and drink our coffee instead of taking it to go (or, if we must be on the run, bring our own travel cup). We should sit down to real dinners on real plates and enjoy real meals instead of getting take-out or a hurried meal on paper plates. We ought to buy quality clothes that we love and wear them till they are worn thin–and then upcycle them into something new, rather than buying something new every other week and tossing the old. We need to have a consciousness of our interactions with the world (which we desperately lack). I am certain we would enjoy life more if we did these things. Secondly, we need regulational changes. We need the government to acknowledge the harmful system we have created and begin to institute penalties for environmentally harmful practices and rewards for conscientious ones. We need to encourage businesses and corporations on a larger scale and at a higher level to take responsibility and find alternatives (such as biodegradable and compostable disposables) to current practices.
I wish that my carrying around a water bottle and a set of utensils all of them time were enough to help fix this problem, but if this experience of avoiding disposables has shown me one thing it is that it is not. I, and all the rest of the our society, need to change our fundamental approach to the world and that is going to take a lot more than I can offer on my own.
Snapshots of a Traveler's Life 