Wrapping your Christmas tree in a plastic bag and leaving it at the curb when the holidays are over is a perfect example of our unnecessary use of single-use plastic.

All over the country, there are likely a few million well-intentioned people who either don’t understand or don’t care about the global plastic crisis who will go to the local hardware or big box store and purchase a plastic “tree removal” bag, making the job of cleaning up after the tree “oh, so simple.”

I admit, it’s a pain in the neck to clean up all those needles after dragging your tree through the house and out the front door, but come on, it’s just once a year and that’s what vacuum cleaners and brooms are for!

That oversized plastic bag has the potential to cause a lot of damage once it leaves your home.

In case you haven’t been following the science, plastic waste no longer just creates a litter problem that can be cleaned up.

Scientists around the world are raising the alarm about the human health impacts of plastic and its constituent chemicals (plastic is made from a simple recipe of fossil fuels plus chemicals), although their voices are often drowned out by commercials from the plastics industry showing happy homeowners recycling their plastic bottles.

The fact is, there’s a lot of unnecessary single-use plastic going into the waste stream, a lot of unnecessary toxic chemical exposure for the people who live in fenceline communities near plastic manufacturing plants, and an unnecessary introduction of chemicals into the environment as that plastic tree removal bag and other plastic items (e.g., diapers, candy wrappers, water bottles, plastic bags and bubble wrap, food packaging, straws, utensils, electronics, etc.) slowly disintegrate into tiny pieces of plastic that will eventually end up in our oceans and be swallowed by fish, or be spread with fertilizer onto farmland where our food is grown.

Either way, it’s likely to end up on our dinner plates, where we will eat it.

This is also the time of year when millions of boats have been hauled out of the water and lined up in boat yards, all neatly shrink-wrapped in giant sheets of white plastic. Yes, it’s convenient for the boat owner.

Plastic is cheap, easy to use, and helps protect the boat from the elements. But most of it – more than 94% by some estimates – ends up in landfills or in the ocean. If the earth could scream, it would.

Manufacturers of plastic tell consumers to “recycle responsibly,” but there is no such thing as responsibly recycling plastic.

If you burn it, it releases highly toxic chemicals. If you bury it, it will eventually break down into microplastics, but they never disappear. And if you try to make new stuff out of recycled plastic, you’ll find that it degrades further with each re-use and not only requires a lot more toxic chemicals but releases toxins into the environment in the process.

Recycling plastic is a lie.

Dr. Leo Trasande, an NYU professor and pediatrician, is a leading expert on endocrine disruption as well as plastic and the potential health risks of the chemicals used to make it. He calls recycling plastic “theater,” because it’s all for appearance, and none of it is real.

“We can’t recycle our way out of the plastic crisis,” he says.

If you put food into containers made from recycled plastic, Dr. Trasande points out, you actually get more toxins, including heavy metals, than if you used virgin plastic, because the chemicals leach easily into the food stored in the containers.

If you drink from a reusable plastic water bottle, especially one that’s been used for a while, your intake of chemicals can be dangerously high.

Here’s the other dirty little secret about plastic. As plastic breaks down into tiny pieces and is scattered into the environment, it reduces the ability of CO2 to be absorbed.

Algae, kelp and other tiny helpers of nature, where micro-plastics easily bind, are inhibited from doing their job. This has a knock-on effect of jeopardizing the entire food chain, threatening wildlife and undermining biodiversity.

Compounding all these problems is the constant lure of money.

Plastic has now become a political issue, as developing nations that are looking for economic growth are easily lured by plastic manufacturers to support their expansion plans. This was evident at the recent meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee established by the UN to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, where progress on “turning off the plastic tap” was blocked by poorer countries counting on big oil and gas companies to set up shop in their territories and spur economic growth.

But the incentive to help developing nations pull themselves out of poverty can’t be the justification for encouraging greater use of plastic.

The simple fact is that plastic is slowly killing us and the sooner we recognize plastic as the threat that it is, the better chance we have of mitigating the damage it is causing.

Government subsidies to oil and gas companies to build new plastic manufacturing plants need to stop. We need to stop installing plastic synthetic turf fields. No more shrink-wrapping giant boats with sheets of plastic.

Let’s use individual reusable metal bottles and coolers with paper cups to hydrate our kids at ball games, not cases of plastic water bottles shrink-wrapped in plastic. Let’s ask our stores not to wrap our fruits and vegetables in PVC plastic film.

And each of us can do our part to turn off the plastic tap. (If you want to know more about what you can do, visit BeyondPlastics.org.)

So when it’s time to un-decorate the tree and haul it out to the curb for pickup, please reconsider purchasing a special plastic bag to wrap it in. Use an old sheet instead.

If you’re a boater, consider canvas as a responsible alternative to plastic wrap. And if your town has a tree mulching program as a way to reuse the trees that have been cut down to once again benefit the environment, please make the effort to participate.

I can’t think of a better way to start the new year!