Getting rid of plastics from homes & gardens

Some input from the forum about this will be appreciated.
Alternatives to Plastic food containers (getting rid of the tupperware)
Alternatives to Plastic buckets I use in the garden so much ...
Tarps, Ropes, Twine and more.

I use mason jars for food storage in and out of the fridge. We have stainless kanteens and lunch containers and zero plastic dishes or utensils. I've got a few pyrex dishes with rubber lids, the lids don't touch the food so I don't mind them so much. There are galvanized buckets, water-resistant canvas (what army tents are made of), hemp and cotton rope. Lots of it is very expensive though. I personally would not worry too much about rope and tarps and the like, plastic is cheap to manufacture (so cheap to buy) and lasts a long time compared to natural fiber in many cases. I aim for minimum plastic in relation to food, also toys and household items, many of them can be found made of natural materials and they hold up better than the plastic versions a lot of the time.
Many fabrics these days are plastic as well (fleece made of old pop bottles), I go for natural fibers there too wherever possible.
http://lifewithoutplastic.com/

What are your reasons?
I would rather reuse free plastic than buy new anything.
I get used, lidded, plastic 10l paint buckets free from my local paint shop.
Jute twine's handy, but old cotton shhets ripped into strips are great for garden tying. At season's end, they go in the compost.
My plastic tarps were free, so same rules apply. There's 'old-school' canvas ones too...
As for food storage, glass jars are great. I don't buy the stuff that comes in them, but plenty of others are happy to donate their jars.
Nearly all come with resealabe lids, so they're really useful.

Tks Crafty for the lifewithout(4letterword) ... for food we are changing to glass and ceramic too. There are some very nice Ceramic cooking pots on the market these days.

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/toxics/polyvinyl-chloride/the-poison-plastic/
Living with chemicals in everything we touch is no longer an option.

Just reading about PVC, Dioxins, Phthalates and BPA in products we use daily makes your hair stand up...

Getting rid of plastics is going to be difficult - how do we replace poly pipes for example?
Hoses? Our entire lives are ruled through the use of oil derived plastic products .

i have a large collection of glass and pyrex ware, although as said above the lids are plastic..some are available with glass lids in some mail order catalogs..and some with screw on metal lids as well.

happy  hunting

I am wondering about alternatives to a plastic wheelbarrow, I use it to transport water for irrigating for first-year hugelbeds during our drought, and I want to leave a bunch of water in it for other uses too...so tempting to just leave water in plastic in sunlight, and that's the worst.  I figure if I could get a hemp liner that would be awesome...a hemp wheelbarrow...people say it can make anything plastic can make, and it would degrade faster but it would degrade into rotted hemp rather than microplastics and toxic chemicals.

You might consider looking into the history of wheelbarrows, which have been around in the West since at least 1220, and in China about a thousand years earlier than that; they were necessarily made out of wood.

Here's an article:  https://www.lowimpact.org/posts/in-praise-of-the-wheelbarrow

I am completely charmed by the wheelbarrow with the sail on it.