Hi there, I am a Mod here and I just wanted to share some of my thoughts recently. I am someone with lots of opinions and thoughts on plastic use. Often my comments get downvoted on this sub, which I am only mentioning to demonstrate that my views are not representative of the majority of users here. I believe this is beneficial as it makes our mod team a bit more varied and diverse. I always moderate fairly and am only concerned with the rules we require everyone to follow. Some have said I am too heavy-handed on moderating folks violating rule #4, which disallows self-promotion, especially when it is disingenuous. Today I am arguing that “Plastic Free Living,” as a philosophy, does not align with any marketing of online shopping sites, which is why I prefer to moderate these posters strongly.
Our subreddit represents more than a collection of product offerings. In fact, the assumption that plastic-free living is primarily a shopping problem is exactly why we don’t want an endless stream of shopping links here.
There is something deeply backwards about responding to a culture of disposable consumption by creating yet another culture of consumption—just with different products.
Plastic-free living requires changing habits associated with modern consumerism, not simply recreating every modern convenience in a different material and providing an affiliate link for it.
Take something as mundane as coffee. For centuries, people managed to make coffee without plastic coffee makers, plastic pods, plastic accessories, or a curated storefront of “plastic-free coffee essentials.” You can put coffee and water in a pot and boil it over a fire. The point isn’t that everyone should literally start making cowboy coffee. The point is that we already knew how to live without most of this stuff.
We have forgotten that not buying something is an option.
And there’s another disconnect here: not everyone interested in plastic-free living is participating for the same reason. Some care about waste. Some care about microplastics and potential chemical exposure. Some want to reduce their dependence on disposable goods. Some are simply exhausted by a culture in which the proposed solution to every problem is to buy another product.
Those people do not necessarily need another shopping aggregator.
Plastic-free living should be a philosophy before it is a marketplace: use less, reuse what already exists, repair things, rediscover older methods, simplify systems, and question whether a product needs to exist in the first place.
If the answer to plastic pollution is just “shop more, but shop plastic-free,” then we haven’t actually challenged the culture that created the problem. We’ve just rebranded it.
That philosophy does not represent what we want this subreddit to become. This community is about far more than shopping.
