Plastic-free July: Day 10

Today was the day of Oxford University’s ICTF Conference, a one-day event for all IT staff across the University. It’s always a fantastic day, full of useful and interesting talks as well as being a brilliant networking opportunity, and I’m really grateful to all the people who organise it.

In general, though, IT-related conferences are often (in my experience) a nightmare for single-use plastics because of the tradition of the ‘conference goody bag’ and the general sea of freebies being given away by vendors: cheap disposable pens, ‘stress balls’ and other desk toys, keyrings, and all sorts of other stuff which basically exists solely for marketing purposes, to shoehorn the vendor’s logo into your life. Sure, lots of these things aren’t technically “single-use”, but even if they’re beautifully made and will last forever, how many of us really need another keyring?

This year I didn’t go out of my way to pick up any freebies, not even the pens which I always tell myself are ‘useful’ (I keep meaning to buy myself a decent refillable biro, and to be honest I probably won’t run out of disposables any time in the next 5 years anyway), but I did claim my conference bag (a sturdy-looking rucksack), so here’s what was in it:

  • Solar charger for mobiles, tablets, etc.
  • Plastic bottle of water
  • Notebook
  • Sample ‘for Dummies’ book
  • Plain disposable biro
  • Fancy disposable biro
  • Box of Smarties
  • Small square of chocolate

So only 3 of the 8 items on there are single-use plastic (of course there are other issues with electronic gadgets, but this is a single-issue challenge we’re doing here!): in conference-goody-bag terms that’s a pretty good hit rate. And while the plastic bottle is intended to be ‘single-use’, it won’t be for me; they don’t last forever, but I do reuse them until they actually fall apart (or until I lose them).

Then the evening social event after the conference was a boat trip, and I’m afraid I didn’t take a) my own cutlery for the food, to use instead of the disposable plastic knives and forks, or b) my keep-cup, to use instead of the plastic ‘glasses’ at the bar (to be fair I could have stuck to beer in glass bottles and/or soft drinks in cans, but someone bought me a G&T…). At the end of the night there were bins full of plastic glasses and cutlery; and while I don’t make a habit of going on boat trips, we were just one of the probably-thousands of trips that the boat hire company Salters Steamers will run this summer.

Once again, my individual choice (or lack of choice) isn’t going to make a big difference here. Though, plastic-related considerations aside, I probably should have skipped the G&T. ;-)