Welcome:

My name is Miguel Solari and I have been living single-use plastic package free since 2014. I am lovingly militant about my plastic free lifestyle commitment and prefer hunger and thirst and a variety of sacrifices over submitting to the convenience of buying anything in plastic and this is my primary qualification for this store and what I am most known for amongst my peers.

I've identified plastic as one of the main culprits of environmental, cultural and even spiritual destruction of our planet and I started this journey by aligning my own habits first. During this journey I have made many people aware of plastic waste problem mostly by example and thus have influenced many peers to reconsider their single use plastic consumption habits. Friends suggested I start a plastic-free resource to help them find alternatives but I decided to go a step further and start #myplasticfreestore with my own quality micro brands. This store project will provide the ideal plastic free products I always dream of having. This project goes even deeper for me as it is just the first step of a larger transformative vision of humanity towards a new world, plastic free living is just an awareness vehicle gateway tool for accessing higher awareness. Yeah, I went there.  

This is me praying under a waterfall and inside a rainbow for my store vision in Bali. Photo by Jiro Schneider.

The Mission: 

This store is committed to:

1. The relentless pursuit of a world without unnecessary plastic thru promoting conscious consumer lifestyle & behavior (true political power) and access to alternative plastic-free solutions. 

2. The provenance of all products and materials and manufacturing practices. 

3. Cultivated relationships and fair trade with our producers and their communities. 

4. Support foundations that focus on single-use plastics education near or in plastic waste stricken communities where our producers live. 

5. Planting trees to offset our shipping carbon footprint from our manufacturers to us. 

Before I tell you more:

Its been only in 2019 that I started to post more openly about my plastic free lifestyle on my personal instagram account @miguelsolari23 but you can find content going back to 2014 on a facebook page I called I Hate Plastic which was going to be the name of my original blog but after much feedback from friends I decided not to use it because of the word "hate." In the end I think that was the wrong decision because I let a word keep me from sharing my journey years ago. The truth is, I do hate plastic, and that is ok. I have decided to act differently from now on and just share and move forward with this project and deal with any mistakes that happen as they happen. Its better to act than not act at all.

My professional background before all this was in tech, spirits (um... booze) and nightlife industries. I moved to Santa Barbara and built a plastic free store for SeaLegacy at the end of 2018. In 2019 I focused on my own plastic free lifestyle media which got me invited to do a few classroom presentations in the San Francisco school district. I also organized regular zero waste potluck presentations in Santa Barbara and still working on starting them in San Francisco. I did this to meet and bring the tribe of zero waste life stylers like myself together to promote and organize around plastic free living ways in our communities. I also worked with Reef Life Foundation's nano mineral matrix coral substrate settlement and regeneration technology prospects and pursuing some high level lead opportunities for Loliware biodegradable seaweed straws in California. Last but not least my best friend, his brother and another fellow ocean defender and I have been working on a mind blowing transformative immersive media theatre show called "Water Speaks." It is designed to inspire personal habit change and awareness towards improving the health of our oceans. My refined plastic-free lifestyle practice is the common factor that keeps me sharply aligned and focused to all this conservation style of work. However, I see something more specific that I need to do in order to really bring all of this together, a plastic free marketplace.  

My Plastic Free Store Project:

I have been dreaming up of starting this site for a couple years now and was full of hangups whether the name, logo or deadlines for other clients, x, y, z and my close friends asking, "hey Miguel, what's up with your store?" and time kept passing and no store yet. So I decided to put up this site to make my self accountable to the world at large and make sure it happens. Instead of having the perfect name I just chose what was my most simple and available "My Plastic Free Store" which describes exactly what it is. For a logo, instead of getting hung up on the most perfect design, I simply picked a cool font and put a rectangle around it. This is all better than nothing at all and it sounded and looked quite nice once I put it up.

I will share the details of my experience of what it takes to launch quality plastic free products. It may or may not be perfect but I am committed to work towards perfection and I will appreciate your feedback along the way. 

On Plastic Free Living and Zero Waste:

My focus is plastic free living which is very closely related to the zero waste movement which I definitely prescribe to by default. One could say that going plastic free is the gateway to zero waste or vice versa, regardless they influence each other because our main common denominator antagonist is single use plastic waste.

I have heard the argument that zero waste isn't even a natural concept but rather an ideal. Everything in nature produces waste in one way or another. The difference is that post industrial human waste doesn't seem to be beneficial to other parts of our ecosystems the way most waste in the rest of nature is. In reality my lifestyle is about achieving low waste. I get excited about emptying my garbage bin as least as possible and that any waste I do produce is mostly compostable or glass or aluminum recyclables only. In case I do end up inheriting plastic, I make myself responsible for properly disposing it. Having said all of this, I definitely identify with the zero waste movement. 

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The rest of this post is REALLY long so you can stop here, I gave you the essentials, but I encourage you read the rest or save it for later. I over share my life because I want you to understand my value system around this project. 

The Long and Strange Trip of How I Became Plastic Free:

My journey into single-use plastic free packaged living officially started in 2014 trip. However the real origins of this story go further back and they are important so and I am going to share all of this first before I answer the question of this post. I wan't you all to know how committed I am to this way of life and the values that make up this store.

The Early Influence:

Since as far back as I remember I've always considered to be spiritual and environmentally aware. I was conceived in Lima Peru from healthy and sober hippie yogi parents who spent a Kumba Mela with their Guru in Machu Pichu Cuzco the year before I was born. I would go to the market with my grandmother in Arequipa before single use plastic bags existed there so she would always bring her own bags. It was my job to carry them empty and help to fit items inside and making sure that soft fruits or vegetables didn't get smashed by heavy items. She had a total of 7 children and she was a full time housewife and her main job was to cook. The concept of 'slow food' didn't exist, it was just how life was. Cooking was an art that took time, patience and love and she had mastered it. There were no microwaves or instant lunches or pre-packaged snacks nor food with preservatives. It turned out she knew over 100 local Arequipeñan dishes by heart and which she started to write down for us before she passed away. For most dishes she cooked almost nothing was wasted. We were taught to never waste food. That was a family rule. 

I do remember seeing mostly paper waste, but a lot of it. Arequipa did not have a good waste management system so most people would empty their bins on street corners which wasn't a pleasant site. There were some products that came in plastic containers back then but for the most part everything was still in either in glass or cans, aluminum or paper. Everyone in Arequipa shopped at the San Camilo central market which you can still visit today and still has reminiscences of what it used to be like. Nothing was packaged, everything was in bulk. Raw ingredients like beans. flours, nuts, etc were tared and neatly folded in newspaper (truth be told I was probably ingesting a lot of led tho) using Peruvian market origami techniques, a lost art by now. When we got home these items were put into different storage containers.

When my mother returned from her first trip from the United States she brought back Saran Wrap for the household and it was the most incredible novelty my grandmother had ever seen. A clingy plastic that was used to conveniently cover and store all food. I think my grandmother made that cling wrap last 5 years since it was the only roll she had. She would naturally reuse each tear until it was truly unusable. I didn't grow up with the concept of 'single use' anything, I ended up learning this once I moved the United States.

Processed Supermarket Food Isles:

I remember when I went into my first supermarket in California where I saw packaged processed food for the first time. The rows of packaged food looked so official and 'good for you' because they were in neat rows with with flashy brands. As a kid I was of course super drawn to Tony the Tiger and all the cartoon branding that drew children to eat junk packaged in plastic bags but my mom knew better and would not allow me to eat that stuff. This first world marketing black magic that sold us processed junk food in single use packaging really worked but deep in my heart the values of reusability that my grandmother instilled in me would grow one day to defiantly refuse plastic packaging and junk food altogether.  

High School and College:

I remember during our high mock school city council I proposed a law to attach recycling bins to city garbage cans. My motion was sadly declined but I was way ahead of the curve because today you find these recycling bins all over my high school city of Evanston, Illinois. I was heavily inspired by the NOLS "leave no trace behind" philosophies and spent many of my teen years in the outdoor arts and a youth summer camp counselor. I spent my college years at the University of Michigan at which point I was too consumed by having a lot of fun. I got into djing, throwing underground parties and amassed a giant vinyl record collection (more on that in another post another day) and founded a major called Organizational Studies (dynamic human systems and management) but I also studied buddhism, kabbalah and other esoteric arts that led me to meet Drunvalo later and learn Sacred Geometry. I have to give props to my cool college sweetheart who put up with me. 

Discovering Toxic Effects of  Plastic in San Francisco

I moved to San Francisco and made enough money in tech to go on a year long trip around the world. I spent 6 glorious months in India on a deep yoga journey meeting gurus and saints along the way. After returning from this epic adventure I naturally dated a cute journalist eco-aware girl who started an awesome green blog. While on a tech reporting assignment at CES in Las Vegas she took a lunch side stroll thru the sex convention that concurrently happens every year, the geeks next to sex freaks, to see if she could find a green story for her blog. She stumbled upon a woman named Diana Cage, a sex toy safety advocate. Cage was distributing information about toxic endocrine disruptor chemicals called phthalates and BPAs which are found in all cheap sex toys back then. So people had been putting these chemicals directly on the mucous membranes of their junks for decades, yuck! It turns out that these chemicals easily enter the bloodstream thru our skin when we come into contact with cheap plastics. These endocrine disruptors are a highly suspect to be the cause of many forms of cancer, fertility, growth and development issues (google all this yourself). This information changed my life and I started to become a plastic skeptic and my relationship to plastic changed. 

I became obsessed with avoiding as much cheap plastic as possible but quickly realized it was impossible. Maybe as a young boy in Peru I could have gone a day avoiding plastic but by the 2006 it was impossible. A few months later my girlfriend wrote a post about the "great pacific gyre," a growing swirl of plastic garbage the size of many US states which was originally discovered by one of my heroes, Captain Charlie Moore. He went on to write a book called Plastic Oceans in which he tells the story of his journey to the middle of the ocean. I credit him for being the most important anti-plastic environmental pioneer who brought us awareness of this subject. His organization today is called Algalita and they focus on marine plastic research, solutions and educating thousands of 'ocean hero youth' (because they are the future so its a good bet to arm them with knowledge on the subject). Anyway, I was dumbfounded that humanity had come to the point where we let this happen. All of our plastic trash ended up floating around the middle of the ocean endlessly fragmenting into smaller and smaller 'micro-plastic' pieces that eventually contaminate the entire marine food chain as species mistake it for food. In 2019 we now have plenty of evidence that this is the case. Least but not all is the ugly fact that most plastic is virtually indestructible and will take at least 450+ years to break down meanwhile leaching out doses of toxicity into our sea and soil species.

The irony at this point was that although I was very aware of the problem I was still consuming a lot of single use plastic by way of packaged foods but didn't even realize it and hypocritically still considered myself an 'environmentalist.' I was still under the spell of 'necessity' that I now question daily. So I would consume the normal body care 'essentials' like toothpaste, shampoo, x, y, z products in plastic because I 'needed it.'

Toxic Fumes:

Some plastics were totally off limits to me by then such as electronics packaging; like that computer cord from Best Buy that comes in mission impossible to open plastic packaging that requires a hacksaw to open. That stuff lets out a particular toxic scent that made me sick and my common sense tells me that those fumes aren't good for your health. I started hating "unnecessary plastic packaging" and the smell of a Best Buy compound. I really should have started blogging about it back then because I had a lot of pictures (which I can't find anymore) of how ridiculous the packaging was. By this point I left a career as a creative director for a digital advertising firm, I travelled around the world again and was still a vinyl dj/collector, threw underground house music parties in San Francisco and sold Peruvian Pisco all over California so I was way too distracted making money and having the best life ever.  During this time I ended up on an EPIC trip to Costa Rica in which I saw my first true plastic beach.

My First Plastic Beach Experiences:

Its not like I had never seen plastic trash on a beach before but what made this different was that I was on a solo hike (without water and I almost died) along the 37km of "pristine beach" (as advertised) of Costa Rica's Corcovado National Park. This place is well protected and considered one of the most diverse ecological parks in the world far away from any large human populations. This place was no match to the human plastic garbage effect however. I kept finding fishing nets, plastic bottles, creepy plastic baby toy heads, and tires strewn all over the coast line. It was very disturbing and I kept thinking about it during all my breaks under beautiful trees. I ended up in Montezuma Costa Rica next (epic experience btw) and stayed in the back of a converted school bus and the emergency door was my entrance right in front of "playa chancla" which means flip flop beach as they called it because it was apparently where everyone lost their flip flops. This is when I started to have disgust for cheap plastic flip flops. In the picture you can see plastic garbage all over this little piece of paradise.

The next day I went on a mile + beach hike with my beautiful friend Ariana. Most of the beach was clean and beautiful but things got really ugly when we got towards the end which was littered beyond my comprehension as you can see in the image here:

There was no large human development anywhere nearby, no big cities, no beach resorts, nothing. How could so much plastic garbage end up here? I was super startled and this left a huge impression on me and I started to think deeply about waste management and my own consumption as I looked around at the weathered toothbrushes and shampoo bottles everywhere. I was floored!

Committing To A Plastic Free Lifestyle:

In 2014 I returned from a magical trip to Santa Marta and the Putumayo in Colombia with a very clear life direction. To briefly summarize I walked away with three messages: 1. You are what you choose and you are what you buy. If this is the case then 2. If you continue to participate in corporatism and buying and choosing things that go against your values then you are the problem so instead 3. Do what is right and not what is easy. I identified hypocrisy as the actual root of most evil and I was guilty of it with everyone else throughout history. 

My life path was instantly redrawn from this revelation. I needed to get serious about to aligning my consumer lifestyle choices to my values but it felt over whelming. So one day soon upon returning to San Francisco I was working at the Whole Foods cafe on Ocean Avenue when suddenly I could not stop staring at the people walking out full of plastic packaging. That is when the lightbulb when off and it became clear to me at that moment that I could no longer be part of this unconscious behavior. Almost nobody seems to stop and think about their participation in the problem and I didn't want to be part of this mass suicide any longer. Quitting unnecessary single-use plastic was a simple place to start tackling the problem of hypocrisy so I removed it from my life completely. This single step had a huge life changing impact on me.

So, in March of 2014 I started on a cold turkey journey and quit buying all single use plastic at once. Was it easy? NO! It was incredibly hard and I will never forget the first day I decided to go back to that same Whole Foods with the silly expectation to find all unpackaged food but I quickly realized I could not buy anything! Everything was packaged in plastic in one way or another  either on the outside or inside a box. The only sections I could buy from where  the produce and bulk aisles and I hadn't even considered how I was going to carry stuff yet. I had to go home and start over. I came back with my own bags and I remembered being a little kid again helping my grandmother carry her reusable shopping bags on the way to the market. This is the way I was raised and this is actually what I considered normal. All of these values started to return to me and I would reference my deepest memories to remember how my grandmother did things. I was able to talk to my mom and get even more information on how things where done when she was growing up. 

This was only the beginning of the journey. I had to figure out all my reusables, deodorants, toothpaste, shaving gear, water.. x,y,z. I was completely floored at what we see in body care aisles at Whole Foods and any other health food store. Brands use words like "sustainable" and "natural" and "organic" and even "responsible" in neatly packaged and colorful plastic containers for their marketing. How can we call something earth friendly or sustainable when its delivered in plastic? This was an irony that I could not accept and one of the inspirations behind this store. I want to be part of the multitude of people working to change this. That's my tribe.

One of the most important unexpected results of this journey is that I ended up eating healthier than ever.  By refusing food packaged in plastic I am almost fully refusing all processed junk food because as a general rule if its in a sealed bag its likely full of preservatives. Either way I just won't purchase it. 

A Quick Note On The Oil Industry:

The oil industry is the biggest culprit for the most human and environmental destruction and they manufacture plastic. The oil industries have invested 250 billion dollars into fracked fossil fuel refinement facilities across the cancer belt of America. Their plan is to double plastic production by 2050 to make up for the loss of profit from the projected growth of electric vehicles. It's rather gnarly to think that as societies are becoming more aware of the environmental dangers of plastic the people behind this industry are hellbent on doubling production. 

Vote With Your Dollar:

With revamped values and plastic free lifestyle senses I processed the world very differently so the 2016 elections stirred up a lot for me. My personal observations of federal lawmaking and political leadership systems led me loose all faith in their ability to produce any positive change. After decades of endless wars, broken political promises, corporate lobbying against our environment and the polarized mass media circus, I stopped paying attention to it. One just needs to follow the money to see that corporate interests are politics anyway. This is the modern world we live in and since this is the case then we should focus more on who we are giving our money to daily instead of a vote every few years. The money in our wallets are the most powerful political tools of modern life with the potential to put us back in the driver seat of society.

The simplest way to understand the economic dictum of 'supply and demand' is that if people keep consuming a particular good, the producer will keep making more of it. So if we keep buying stuff from companies that are ruining the environment then we are directly ruining the environment. Lets just be real about it. Its easier to blame big corporations for ruining the planet than to turn the finger on our own convenience driven consumer habits. Lets spend more time investigating what and who we are purchasing from on a daily or weekly basis and see if we agree with their political interests and buy accordingly instead.

If we continue to accept plastic for example, then we are directly voting for more plastic to be produced and more oil to be fracked and ultimately voting against our environment. On the other hand if we firmly deny plastic producing corporations our hard earned money and shift our time and effort towards alternatives then we are acting from a place of power instead of complacency. This is real freedom and a direct way to participate in a modern democracy. If enough people do this then eventually these 'bad' companies will have no choice but to change their practices or go out of business. You are in charge. We are what we choose. 

Voting with our dollar is the number one solution to all environmental problems. This allows us to vote on behalf of the environment daily rather than once every four years for the antiquated system of political leadership. I want to clarify that political legislation is definitely necessary but legislation will not happen fast enough if we continue to buy from irresponsible companies. If anything that helps them win the case against us. If we want to help environmental legislation happen then we need to act and buy like we mean it. Like one of my favorite humans, Tom Szaky (who is also a huge spokesperson for this philosophy and owns Terracycle and Loopstore) once said to me: "If you want an easy way to fix all the environmental problems, just stop buying stuff." 

So to answer what being plastic free is to me, here are my rules: 

• Buy nothing that is sealed inside plastic unless its a medical emergency
• Do not accept single use plastic items from any business or friends
• Buy from/reward companies and products that don't use plastic packaging.
• Buy used goods (technology) whenever possible and only new if absolutely necessary (hardware for media creation to promote plastic free) and always explore and adopt DIY options first.
• If I inherit plastic be responsible for its proper disposal or recycling.
• Educate others and say something to business owners who still use single use plastic.

Has this been a perfect practice? Absolutely not, I still make mistakes but because I've built the awareness I'm always getting better. Unnecessary plastic items have still sneak into my life, I am not perfect. Tiny wrappers, price tags, produce stickers, concert wrist bands and many other miscellaneous tiny items. I've bought some camera gear that was only available new and inherited that plastic garbage. I constantly learn more and more about what I can buy and get closer and closer to my ideal and hone skill. Part of this store project is to provide for those things that I know are hard to find. I never started a mason jar like others have but after 5 years I know I would barely fill it.

Avoiding Plastic Is Good For The Spirit:

I love refusing plastic so much that I will go hungry or thirsty if I have to. This is my claim to fame around my friends and family. I'd rather suffer than giving into the instant gratification of buying something wrapped in plastic. I learned this the hard way during airport travel and road trips in which I didn't prepare for. I loved the process of refusal and turned it into my personal prayer towards the plastic-free packaged world I want to live in. Every time I engage my will power I become more powerful.

I see the world thru a lens of plastic consumption avoidance. I've developed this extra sensory awareness about it. I see details that most don't see and demand commerce to give me the products I need without the plastic packaging. My consumerism has become very simplified. I don't even have to look at anything if its already inside a plastic package because its off limits to me anyway. I've saved a lot of money this way. The line in the sand is a canyon. So, yes, I truly have not bought anything packaged in plastic for over 5 years as of writing this post in October of 2019.

Having said all this about plastic I will admit here the 2 limitations that I have never found an alternative for. The first are contact lenses and supplies and the second are toothbrushes. Even if you buy a bamboo toothbrush the bristles are all made of small nylon fibers which are some of the worst things you can introduce into the waste stream (If I find a toothbrush solution I will sell it on this store). So my solutions to these two things aren't perfect. I use my contacts very sparingly and I've used the same toothbrush for a few years now and constantly working on finding a solution.

I'd like to add that going plastic free to me is a spiritual practice. I see the plastic free movement as an opportunity for humanity to have a very tangible awareness practice to work towards. No need to attend a spiritual retreat, just start to work on this habit change daily. Attention is the gateway into a greater consciousness and higher awareness because it forces us to pay attention to what we do and buy. Having good attention is the first step of any spiritual practice anyway. I've done vision quests where I don't eat and drink water for 4 days on top of mountains, 10 day silent Vipassana meditations and 10+ day fasts and yet none of these hold a finger to the attention and awareness required to catch the personal unnecessary plastic consumption impulses. If anything it was just preliminary training for this lifestyle. 

Plastic free living has the potential to wake up humanity's collective power. Once more and more people begin to take consumer matters into their own hands begin to refuse the things we don't need and we can see true change possible. If anything, its a vehicle for simple personal transformation of awareness and freedom of choice rather than the manufactured consent and illusion of choice veil created by this age of consumerism. 

Plastic free living eventually opens doors to different dimensions of freedom from the manufactured consent of mass consumerist choices. It eventually simplifies our lives and restructures our alignment to our natural world. It fine tunes all our value systems and ultimately makes us more responsible citizens. It is also the gateway towards a zero waste lifestyle. 

This is why I am making this store and these are the values I want to support. Please join me and make My Plastic Free Store, yours!

I AM NOT PERFECT

To end this post I need to state that I am NOT perfect. Although I manage myself strictly around single-use plastic I still drive a car and ride planes and consume plenty of fossil fuels. I have not spent enough on carbon offset credits to make up for my carbon footprint. I am only 90% vegan because I can't do the fake meats that are packaged in single use plastic. By the same token I also don't buy cheese or yogurt because its all sold in plastic but Ill gorge on the cheese plate hors d'oeuvres at your party when I'm hungry. So, again, I am not perfect, however I'm well aware of my condition and I am striving to find solutions to all these things. I will be off the grid someday and look forward to the day when I get rid of my electric gas hybrid car and have enough resources to plant 10x more trees than any carbon credit can buy when I travel abroad. There is always more work to do and I am looking forward to it. 

Zerowaste SB and SF:

If you live near these areas please feel free to join our Zerowaste Potlucks. Here is a pic from our first potluck in 2019