A household frees itself of plastic. Almost

MUMBAI: In 1997, a Danish dance-pop group shot to fame with the hit ‘Barbie Girl’. The song topped the charts worldwide and parodied our increasingly artificial lifestyles with catchy lyrics like ‘Life in plastic, it's fantastic!’ Since then, our reliance on this light, durable material has only risen and so have photographs of animals trapped in plastic waste.There was Peanut, a turtle whose shell had been forced to grow around a tight plastic band, giving her an alarmingly slender waist; and a white stork entangled in a billowing plastic bag.
Thus, it’s no wonder that the world over, nature lovers have begun searching for sustainable alternatives to plastic. Mumbai resident Arundhati Mhatre, for instance, has gone to great lengths to purge plastic from her family’s life. Not only has she switched to cloth bags for groceries and stainless-steel storage boxes for grains, she also found a glass tiffin box for her husband and an aluminum water bottle for her son.
A teacher at Tardeo’s Golden Spiral School, Mhatre believes plastic has harmful toxins and there are flecks of it in various hygiene products. So, her family uses dant manjan instead of toothpaste and ubtan, an ayurvedic powder, instead of soap. Mhatre’s husband isn’t a fan of ubtan; so, she makes him mud soaps using multani mitti, sesame oil, camphor and ajwain. And after reading that sanitary towels take hundreds of years to decompose, Mhatre switched to cloth pads and a reusable silicone menstrual cup last year.
Her seven-year-old son, Malhar, coincidentally born on World Environment Day, quickly adapted to a plastic-light existence. Most of his toys are made of wood or cloth and when he wanted a boomerang, his mother fashioned one out of paper.
As yet, Mhatre hasn’t been able to find good alternatives for plastic raincoats and umbrellas, or toothbrushes because even bamboo ones have plastic bristles. She also concentrates on creating awareness. “One part of your mind keeps asking, ‘Why are you making so much effort when everyone else is just dumping plastic everywhere?’” So, ten months ago, she left her job as a software engineer and began teaching gardening and ecology at her son’s school