One of my dear friends received his sunscreen recently and called me: “What’s with this dented aluminum tube? Plastic tubes would be so much sleeker!”
“Don’t worry,” I assured him. “It hasn’t been tampered with; these packaging irregularities are totally normal for the material we chose to use.”
Yes, plastic does look pretty and doesn’t dent, but when debating between plastic tubes and aluminum ones it became clear that the benefits of sturdy, dent-free plastic did not outweigh the material’s tremendous costs to the environment.
I explained the pitfalls of plastic to my friend. “Aluminum is easily recycled into new, recyclable products!”
He still had questions.
“What about getting plastic from China? and every country in the world uses plastic, so who cares if you use a few plastic tubes?”
I told him that the energy costs of shipping plastics overseas from China are huge.
As for “every country in the world” using plastic, well, let’s take another look at that: China has already banned plastic bags, and- oh yeah- cities in our own country have, too!
We believe we’re doing the earth a favor with our decision. So when your aluminum tubes of sunscreen arrive, consider the natural variations in texture as just another beautiful element of one of earth’s most recyclable materials.
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