Looking at your plastic diary at the end of your recording period should leave you in no doubt: we need to reduce the amount of plastic in our lives. We can’t wait for robots to come and scoop it from the ocean and fashion it into trainers (although, intriguingly, this is also happening!). The reduction starts right now, with us.
Stating that we need to reduce plastic packaging certainly won’t win me any awards for innovation! On one level, it is crashingly obvious. It’s similar to telling someone on a diet to ‘just eat less’, or someone who smokes to ‘just stop’. But these things are all hard to do. ‘Reduce’ needs to be reiterated constantly because we’re locked into cycles of daily consumption, and it’s so habitual we honestly forget that we are in control and can take our foot off the metaphorical pedal.
The diet analogy is a good one for another reason. Your plastic diary is the equivalent of a food diary – and those have been shown to be pretty effective. There is a connection, it seems, between writing down everything you eat, including the stuff that somehow sneaks in, and taking conscious, everyday, considered steps to stick to a healthy eating plan.
Let’s start with the low-hanging fruit. These are very easy wins, and we should have no shame about that.
Begin by ticking every possible box to dent the flow of plastic coming into your home. Increasingly, those boxes are online and on phone apps. Opt out of plastic anywhere and everywhere you can.
SINGLE-USE PLASTICS
Chances are, you’re pretty alarmed by the number of disposables you’ve collected and recorded in your plastic diary. There’s certainly a lot of heat at the moment around the idea of creating disposable plastic or alternatives that will make it all better. I have a lot of time for some of these innovations, but we are not there yet. Anywhere, any way you can, you need to reduce your dependency on single-use products made just so that you can simultaneously run for the bus and get your caffeine fix.
A really simple way to do this is by separating the behaviour from the product. Why not make time to eat properly? Next time you grab a coffee, go to a cafe that serves coffee in-house in china cups, sit down, take the weight off your feet and spend ten to fifteen minutes over your drink. It’s restorative, plastic-free and just quite a nice thing to do.
CUT DOWN ON FIZZY POP
Across Europe, an incredible 46 billion beverage bottles are consumed every year. Almost half are thought to be plastic single-use bottles, and many of these will contain sugary fizzy pop. Almost half of the 35 million plastic bottles bought in the UK every day are not recycled. If you must indulge, buy a canned drink instead, or do your teeth and the environment a favour and curb that urge entirely! Win-win?60
PLASTIC STRAWS SUCK
Single-use plastic straws suck (incidentally, this is the name of a highly successful celebrity-endorsed campaign in the US that has seen straws effectively banned from Seattle). With the exception of those with particular disabilities (who should be offered non-plastic replacements, which we’ll look at shortly), most of us do not need straws to drink with, but we have been somehow seduced into embracing the idea that certain tipples must be drunk with a straw in order to fulfil a mythological fun quotient. Let’s call time on these tubes of needless plastic that are used for an average of twenty minutes, but that represent several lifetimes of trouble for the environment.
Then there are the harder-to-reach bits that we need to try to change.
ONLINE SHOPPING: PLASTIC BAGS AND UNNECESSARY PACKAGING
Assert control over the services you outsource. Increasingly, that includes both our grocery and non-food shopping, as we go online to do our supermarket orders and Amazon famously takes over the world. This remains a tough one to crack. When the click of your order button sends robots off to pick your groceries at fulfilment centres (and will soon include delivery via a driverless van), there are precisely zero opportunities to have a chat with a human to ask if they could kindly lose the excessive packaging and multiple carrier bags. A few online retailers now give the option to select ‘no bags’. Others are still relying on recycling carrier bags, insisting that multiple carriers are necessary. In my experience, this is the thing that galls modern-day consumers most.
Another thing that incites ‘wrap rage’ in even the most mild-mannered consumer are ‘over-packaged’ deliveries. There are now entire Facebook pages dedicated to Amazon fails, citing nail varnishes that arrive in a cardboard box big enough for a sideboard. These egregious examples of extreme over-packaging appear to defy common sense. There’s a reason for that: the retail giant has instead applied commercial sense via a standardised formula to shipping goods. Large boxes are padded out with Air Cushions (i.e., air sealed inside plastic). Air Cushions have quickly displaced newspaper and shredded paper to become a major new plastic peril (although, applying Hobson’s Choice, they are marginally preferable to styrofoam, also often seen bobbing about the ocean, with bite marks where fish have taken a toxic mouthful).
In my opinion the online retailers still have a lot of work to do to reduce their plastic footprint, which of course becomes ours. I know I’m one of the last Luddites in town, but this means I buy very little online. I prefer to control the packaging I’m taking responsibility for.
Tick Amazon’s ‘Frustration Free’ packaging option, which is designed to minimise wrap rage at the very least. It will shield you from hard-to-recycle plastics, including the moulded plastic that surrounds many items, such as torches and toys, that can be impossible to get into. In the early noughties British studies revealed that more than 150 people a day accidentally stabbed themselves trying to open packaged products. Moulded, vacuum-sealed plastic packaging film that resisted any attempt to open them without a knife or sharp scissors was very much in the frame. It was calculated that treating packaging injuries cost the NHS a hefty £11 million a year.61
BUY LESS STUFF
While mainstream retailers and e-tailers remain incapable of providing unpackaged consumer goods, you can of course easily make a dent by simply acquiring less. ‘Buy less stuff’ is another bleedingly obvious bit of advice, but the moment you don’t buy something is always a win for the planet (unless you’re buying, say, a solar panel).
DECLUTTER
According to studies, the average American home now contains more than 300,000 items, and I doubt the UK is far behind. There is always an extra small cupboard or shelf that can be put up, and guess what? More plastic paraphernalia will come and nest there.
TAKEAWAY AND FAST-FOOD PACKAGING
According to beach clean data, this is one of the top ocean plastic scourges. Say no to as much takeaway or fast-food plastic coming into your house as possible. Online food delivery service Just Eat, for example, has trialled a pre-ticked box on its app and website allowing customers to opt out of receiving extra single-use plastic items such as cutlery, straws and sauce sachets. Check your preferences on apps you order from frequently and take advantage by ticking opt-outs where possible (it will also remind you of how much apparently mandatory plastic is forced upon us).
A TSUNAMI OF FOOD PACKAGING
Next, we need to tackle packaging. You cannot have failed to notice that most of the plastic that you’ve recorded in your plastic diary falls into the packaging category. And most of it is wrapped around your food. This presents a dilemma. It seems that to reduce plastic would mean reducing all sorts of foods, and honestly, a person has to eat. So we need to unwrap our grocery shopping from the material that swaddles it.
It’s not easy, because Lord, have we developed a thing for packaging in this country! An estimated 2.26 million tonnes of plastic packaging is produced every year in the UK, of which three-fifths (61 per cent) ends up being dumped.62
This has everything to do with the fact that we’re a supermarket culture. A supermarket economy means a plastic ecology. Supermarkets are responsible for pushing out 800,000 tonnes of plastic packaging a year. Some days I feel like that’s all that’s going into my trolley, and therefore into my bin.
You’re probably worried that I’m going to insist you forswear the multiples, and send you off with a wicker basket to far-flung farmers’ markets. This would undoubtedly help – and the more of your shop you can transfer to non-mainstream outlets, the more plastic you can eliminate. I think it is worth trying your local greengrocers and butchers, too, as many are receptive to you using your own containers. But we also have to face facts: many of us are dependent upon supermarkets – not least because they are affordable. Busy lives dictate that you can’t always go foraging for less-packaged options. But don’t worry, I think you can still cut down. We can be smart about it, using supermarket hacks that mean the plastic isn’t dumped on us:
Buy the loose veg!
I’m always intrigued when my friends tell me they don’t trust loose fruit and veg because they’re worried about hygiene. The bagged, punneted and sealed varieties offer peace of mind. I’m not sure how they know what’s happened to it behind the scenes, or maybe they just fear that it has been pawed and squeezed by other shoppers. But I do know this: if there was a genuine risk of serious illness and fatality from unpackaged fruit and veg, supermarkets would not have boxes of it lined up next to the packaged stuff. Let logic win over paranoia. Wash your fruit and veg before use in mild soapy water, or use a special fruit and veg wash, which you’ll find in As Nature Intended and other health food stores.
Obviously, not all fruit and veg can be brought to the checkout completely loose. I wouldn’t want to queue behind somebody who needed twenty salad potatoes individually weighed and scanned, ditto radishes and tomatoes. But a useful hack to avoid plastic here is to nab one of the paper bags that mushrooms are, for some reason, specially afforded.
Avoid like the plague anything wrapped in thin plastic film. Manufacturers and retailers insist that the shrink-wrap on cucumbers and other closely wrapped produce makes them last longer and is of massive benefit to shoppers. Well, I can’t stand it. It makes the cucumber slimy and me less inclined to eat it. The recycling rate for plastic film is just 3 per cent – so I’m pretty sure my council won’t take it. I simply won’t let it into my shopping trolley.
Keep it simple
Simple foods that don’t require refrigeration in the supply chain, or lots of complex messaging, tend also to have less complex packaging (which is difficult or impossible to recycle). Low-fat foods, for example, have been shown to have more complex packaging containing more plastic. This is to do with the fact that they need more artificial flavouring that’s kept sealed in through packaging.
Buy in bulk
Buying larger multipacks will reduce packaging waste. Most of the products we buy are repeat products, so where possible buy big – a pack of eighteen toilet rolls instead of four, a single 10 kg sack of rice instead of twenty 500 g bags.
Grow your own
This is not a rerun of the Good Life with Barbara and Tom, but if you find, when you consult your grid, that you’re accumulating a lot of salad packaging, replacing bagged salad and radishes in punnets with some home-grown produce could be a really easy win. This packaging is a pain. I’m not saying it’s not clever: it facilitates long-haul flights and journeys by truck. But that is for the convenience of the supply chain, not for yours. It is really hard to get rid of. I dislike the air-modified packaging that dictates how many salad leaves I get and is crispier than the lettuce within it.
To cut this nonsense out of your life – at least in the summer months – you only need a little space to grow some salad leaves that can be repeatedly harvested, or even a strawberry bed or a wigwam of runner beans. In my own plastic inventory, I found I had a lot of plastic bags for herbs (three or four a week). These are easily grown in pots.
Stop snacking
This might be an unexpected boon, but people who’ve tried out my strategy so far report that they’ve also lost weight! Imposing a plastic purge means confronting crisp bags (metallised plastic which can technically be separated but rarely is) and chocolate wrappers. When it comes to the latter, smaller, niche ethical brands such as Divine Chocolate and Seed & Bean have gone out of their way to avoid flexible shiny plastics, replacing these with Forest Stewardship Council-certified paper and compostable versions. The multinational confectionery companies with their incredible size, power and profits, however, continue to wrap the 600,000 tonnes of chocolate treats we get through annually in the UK in wrappers containing polypropylene. There is only one way to tackle this – to swerve it entirely. Nobody is saying it won’t be tough!
Cook from scratch, and eat less meat
These are both traditional, eco-friendly ways of eating, but they also help reduce plastic. If our recycling system worked differently, eating ready meals might not be such a great source of plastic waste. But the current mainstream system can’t cope with the black plastic trays. Film, as we know, is also a problem. Meat cuts are sold in rigid plastic packaging (only 10 to 15 per cent of all the plastic that is recycled in the UK falls into this sector). The meat industry has also pioneered multilayer film constructions that can get to fifteen layers. In truth, no easily accessible recycling process will have any truck with that. When we talk about reducing, it’s not only plastic overall, but also the really complex bits that defy our bins and brains. As I no longer eat meat, I find that I’m spared a lot of the difficult plastic decisions, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in solutions for meat eaters, too!
Buy from the fish counter and the butchery and bakery counters
And take your own containers. Whereas some might have balked at that, it’s becoming much more common. Use an ice cream tub with a piece of kitchen roll for meat, that can be flipped easily into the frying pan.
Morrisons and I haven’t always seen eye to eye on plastic – you might remember coconut-gate and the shrink-wrapping argument of 2015 – but they have introduced a scheme where customers can take their own containers into stores. These are weighed at the counter, before your raw meat or fish is placed into them, displacing a load of plastic. At the counter, labels are attached to your tubs, and you take them to the till as usual. Hot on the heels of Morrisons’ announcement, Tesco announced it too was trialling a similar scheme. So there are a few reasons to be cheerful.
Finally, consider shifting some of your spend to a store that’s leading rather than playing catch-up
As we’ve established, Iceland – the store, not the country – is already ahead of the game, kicking out plastic from its stores at an impressive rate. By the time I visited the head office just outside Chester and a store at New Brighton in the winter of 2018, the initiative was well under way. Even some of the brand’s ready meals were now 85 per cent plastic-free; the film across the top was proving stubborn, but the head of packaging innovation was confident they would soon find a better alternative.