I wonder how many of us are brave enough to spend a whole month without plastic. As most food products including vegetables seem to be wrapped in plastic, it’s very hard to find plastic free products. Some grocery stores do offer vegetables free of plastic but fruit is not so easy if you like berries like I do; they almost always come in plastic containers.

Of course we should, try our best to avoid plastic every time we buy, but somehow it seems very difficult. Perhaps we can bring our own containers to transfer produce into and insist on paper rather than plastic bags.

The amount of plastic that washes up on our beaches every year is shameful and quite unnecessary. 8 million tons of plastic are deposited in the oceans every year. There are 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic floating around in the ocean today according to Ocean Cleanup. Plastic debris causes the deaths of more than a million seabirds and more than 100,000 marine mammals each year. Most of the plastic waste is from the US and Asia. There are many conservation efforts to combat this problem, but we can start at home by choosing to avoid plastic. Ocean Conservancy is one group fighting to save our oceans and clean up the plastic. There are also books that guide you on living without plastic.

Many of my recent paintings are about the plastic pollution of our seas. I donate a percentage from sales of my water paintings to Ocean Conservancy.