We tried a plastic-free week at school. We mostly failed, and that was the whole point.

The idea came from our school's tiny eco club: five of us, one very patient teacher and a projector that works on alternate Tuesdays. Instead of making another poster that says "say no to plastic", we decided to run an experiment on ourselves. For five school days we'd try to avoid single-use plastic and, more importantly, count every piece we couldn't avoid.

I'm writing this up because the result wasn't what any of us expected. I assumed we'd feel proud by Friday. Mostly we felt humbled, which I think is a better outcome.

The rules

• One tally sheet each, taped inside our diary.
• Every time you touch a single-use plastic item (wrapper, sachet, bag, cup, straw, cutlery, bottle, medicine strip), you write a line and its category.
• Don't buy anything new to avoid plastic. No fancy bamboo kits. That's just shopping with extra steps.
• No guilt, no judging each other, no photos of somebody else's lunch.

Monday: easy mode

Steel bottle, cloth bag, steel tiffin. I felt very superior until recess. The canteen sells almost everything in packets: biscuits, chips, juice, even the sandwich is wrapped in film. I bought nothing and ate my tiffin. A little hungry but fine. My tally for the day was three lines, and all three were things I hadn't chosen: the milk packet at home, the blister strip of my mother's tablets, a pen refill.

Wednesday: the collapse

Someone's birthday in class. Chocolates in wrappers, juice boxes with straws, plastic spoons for the cake. One of us ate a wrapped chocolate and then quietly stuffed the wrapper into her bag so she wouldn't have to record it. We all noticed, we all laughed, and she confessed. Then we made her tally it. That was the moment I understood what the experiment was really about: being plastic-free in a world that hands you plastic isn't a willpower problem.

What the tally said

By Friday the biggest category for all five of us, by a clear distance, was snack and food wrappers. Not bottles. Not carry bags. We'd mostly beaten those two. Wrappers were the hard ones, and I went down a rabbit hole about why.

Many chips and biscuit packets are multilayer laminates: a thin plastic layer, then often a shiny metallised layer (that silver inside), then another plastic layer. They keep food crisp, which is great, but the layers are bonded together and most recycling setups can't separate them cleanly. So they tend to end up burned, buried or in a drain.

Our teacher kept repeating the order of the ladder: refuse, reduce, reuse, recycle. Recycling is the last step, not the first. And "plastic" isn't one material. That little number inside the triangle on the bottom of a container is the resin code: 1 is PET (water bottles), 2 is HDPE (the stiffer bottles for milk or shampoo), and the numbers go up to 7 for "other". Codes 1 and 2 are the ones most commonly collected and recycled. But the triangle only tells you what the plastic is made of, not that it will get recycled. Also, recycled plastic is often turned into lower-quality products instead of becoming the same bottle again.

Two more things that surprised us. First, paper cups for tea usually have a very thin plastic lining inside so they don't go soggy, which means they're not plastic-free either. Second, plastic doesn't "go away". It slowly breaks into smaller and smaller pieces, microplastics, under sun and wear, rather than biodegrading on any timescale that matters to us.

What worked and what didn't

We managed to swap	We couldn't avoid
steel bottle instead of packaged water	medicine blister strips
cloth bag, plus a bag inside the bag	packaged snacks at celebrations
own tiffin and own spoon	milk packets and sachets
"no straw please" at the juice stall	packaging on stationery and files
asking for tea in a glass or kulhad	wrappers on things we were gifted

What I actually think now

Some single-use plastic items, like plastic straws and cutlery, have been officially banned in India since July 2022, but you can still find them. Rules matter, enforcement matters, and so does what companies are asked to do about their own packaging. A five-person club can't fix that. But the experiment did three real things.

1. We stopped treating every wrapper as a personal moral failure. A lot of our plastic came from decisions made long before it reached us.
2. We now have a specific list to take to the canteen manager, which is much better than a poster. He listened, and he has agreed to try steel plates for one meal a week to see how it goes.
3. We rediscovered the boring stuff: use what you already have, reuse it for a long time, and don't buy a "green" version of something just to feel better.

We'll repeat the week next month with the canteen on board. If you want to run your own tally, my advice is: be kind to yourself, count honestly, and don't hide the wrapper.