About a year ago, we made our biannual trek to the movie theater to see Coraline in 3D. I enjoyed the movie, but not the thought of thousands of pairs of plastic one-time use 3D glasses headed to the landfill.
After the movie, we held on to our glasses. Given our infrequent movie viewing, I was highly skeptical about whether it was worth keeping them. Would we even be able to find them the next time we went to a 3D movie?
Enter Avatar. I was on the fence about seeing it for a couple of weeks but, after hearing a coworker rave about it, I decided to give it a chance. Lo and behold, I located our 3D glasses with minimal effort.
We purchased the 3D tickets, paying the additional charge for the glasses we didn’t plan to use. I suspected the glasses we had were identical to those they were distributing, but, just to be safe, we both accepted a new pair as we entered. We compared the old and the new, careful to avoid opening the sealed plastic packaging, and found them to be identical, so we returned the unopened packages. (Real-D, the company that makes the glasses, had changed the packaging a bit (intentionally??), but the contents were equivalent.)
After the movie, I faced the dilemma of recycling my 3D glasses (which had not been available when we saw Coraline), or keeping them for my next 3D movie adventure.
Assuming that they were truly recycling the glasses (i.e., using energy to destroy and melt them to become some other plastic product) and not reusing them (i.e., handing out the still perfectly good glasses to future movie viewers), I opted to save my glasses for future personal use.
In my dream world, the movie theaters would get on board with this and offer a cheaper ticket to those who bring in their own 3D glasses, but I’m sure somebody’s making a killing (and killing the earth) off of that $2-3 dollars per pair. So next time, I may just have to take matters into my own hands.
Her Green Life 