9

REPLACE

I’m not usually the envious type, but I turned green when I came across photographs of Ekoplaza, a small Dutch supermarket in Amsterdam. Instead of the standard walls of technicolour, oil-based, garish plastic bottles, tubs and boxes, was an entire long aisle that was totally plastic-free. Ekoplaza became the first supermarket in the world to consciously create a plastic-free section. It was a sight for sore eyes: 700 products, including milk in glass bottles, sausages wrapped in a compostable plant-based material and loose fruit and veg produce, showed that it could be done. If only we had such an amazing resource at our fingertips here in the UK.

Certainly swapping out plastic products in favour of plastic-free versions is much easier if you have alternatives in shops stocked full of creative solutions nearby. If we don’t quite have Ekoplaza, we do have some other good outlets where you can bulk-buy and refill, and more zero-waste stores popping up across the UK. But replacing and switching out plastic products is worth tackling in any case, even if you have to work a bit harder. Why? Because it will do wonders for bringing down your plastic waste. And once you’ve switched to non-plastic options, I suspect you’ll prefer them.

Replace at the right time. Everything that has been made has what is called a ‘break-even point’, when the amount of resources that went into making it are offset by the number of times it is used. That’s one reason why single-use items made from oil-based plastic that expends fossil fuels, make zero sense. It’s also why it makes eco-sense to finish the products you already have (the exception being any older cleaning or beauty products you may have hanging around that contain microbeads). Try to reuse, refill or recycle empty bottles or containers.

Overleaf I’ve listed possible ways to replace plastic items. Where possible, I’ve tried to give a number of alternatives which in some cases reduce the amount of plastic in, or on, a product (dematerialisation), or are a switch to a product made of a more easily recyclable plastic.

It is not exhaustive. Given that modern society dictates that we keep a huge number of items, a great deal of which are likely to be plastic, in our homes, that would be ridiculous. Rather, my tips will give you broad-brush guidance on what sorts of substitutes and which product areas need to be tackled, when and why.

For local stockists, recommendations and help at the outset, I recommend that you get online and plug into the plastic-free community movement. Up and down the country they are standing firm, showing the Dunkirk spirit.

This is apt because many of the hottest plastic alternatives back on the table are redolent of post-war frugality. Some are golden oldies that many of us will remember from childhood. Others date back further.

Switch to glass milk bottles

The first glass bottle milk deliveries took place at the end of the nineteenth century. The use of glass for our milk stemmed from the literal desire to show transparency. The customer could see straight away that there was no flotsam or jetsam in their pint-a-day. Now that we take that as a given, there are lots of other things to love eco-wise about the classic glass milk bottle. Once rinsed and returned to the doorstep by the consumer, the bottles are collected as part of the morning milk run, taken to a local bottling plant, sterilised and are ready to be refilled. Each glass milk bottle is reused an average of thirteen times before being recycled.63

The win here is in the neat simplicity and the turnaround speed. The plastics industry might argue that PET and HDPE – common types of plastic used for milk containers – can be collected and successfully recycled into new food-grade material. But, as we know, in practice plastic recycling often falls woefully short.

According to Dairy UK, doorstep glass milk bottle deliveries have risen to nearly to one million per day, up from 800,000 two years ago. Could this be the biggest comeback since Lazarus?

Invest in a SodaStream

The fight against avoidable plastic tends to centre on bottled water, with good reason. But other carbonated drinks are also a huge source of plastic. Households in Europe with a fizzy drink habit get through between 1,200 and 1,500 bottles and cans in a year. Making the bottles from oil uses in the region of 100 million barrels of oil or twenty times the amount that spilled in the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. Home carbonators or soda mixers – SodaStream being the best known – can therefore have a massive impact on your plastic flow. You might remember them from the 1980s, but the next-generation models come in different shapes and sizes: now there’s even a portable version, the BubbleCap (from Finland). Switching from carbonated beverages in plastic bottles to a SodaStream is marginally better for your health, too, as the flavoured syrup concentrates use less sugar. And it’s cheaper – as a single gas canister will give you 100 half-litre bottles of fizzy pop or plain fizzy water.

Switch to glass containers

For an easy, immediate win, which doesn’t need too much thought or planning, swap glass for plastic wherever possible. By 2020 a spectacular 80 per cent of glass will be recycled, and as a material stream it’s well on its way. Not only is it easily and infinitely recyclable, it is also proven to be nontoxic as far as food is concerned and very good at preserving. Glass is not so great for bathroom products, though, not least because of the issue of smashed glass around bare feet. We’ll deal with glam and grooming containers separately.

Embrace Tupperware

A good set of Tupperware plastic containers – other brands are available – represents the household workhorse, or pit pony, that will take the strain in your shift away from single-use plastics. It might seem counter-intuitive to invest in yet more plastic, but these are going to offset their creation by working really, really hard and supplanting a lot of ‘disposable’ tubs and trays.

Deciding which brand to invest in is important, because you will have a view on Bisphenol A (known as BPA), a chemical additive added to plastics #3 and #7 (check the reverse of containers) that has been shown as a hormone disruptor in some laboratory tests on mice. However, other tests have not been able to replicate these results, and that has ended up in a scientific stand-off. Cynics say those tests, which haven’t flagged up an issue with BPA, are industry-funded.

The jury is out too on what the implications are for human health. Scientific squabbling apart, you may not want to take the risk. In the US, Tupperware made after 2010 is BPA-free. Here, things are different; the Food Standards Agency is not convinced there is a problem. You may therefore want to seek out certified BPA-free containers – made of plastics #4 and #5. In the UK, Lock & Lock offers an extraordinary range of sizes of BPA-free containers (lakeland.co.uk) and the brand U Konserve (greenpioneer.co.uk) stocks a good range alongside other reusable lunch snack packs, ice packs and tins. If you’re suspicious of all plastics (and in some ways I really can’t blame you) consider Pyrex and use a tiffin tin for snacks.

Replace as many single-use containers as you can by using your own Tupperware whenever possible. Don’t be shy about pushing it under the noses of the people behind the counter at bakeries, meat and fish counters. Ordering takeaways? If you know the outlet well (no judgement here) and collect your takeaway food, tell them you are bringing your own containers along and to let you know when your meal is ready. Remember to label your Tupperware – you don’t want it to go walkabout.

Keep your Tupperware in good nick to extend its working life for as long as possible. Hand-wash, preferably, never use in the microwave and if you are dishwashing (Tupperware products are dishwasher-safe), put them on the top shelf, wash seals and containers together so they don’t go AWOL. For stubborn staining, scrub them clean using a bit of baking soda and an old toothbrush.

Switch to laundry soap nuts

The last time laundry soap was hot was in the 1920s. Popped into the script of sequential radio dramas by advertisers, it would be liberally referenced by a character (female, of course) and lo! the soap opera was born.

But old-fashioned laundry soap requires a degree of commitment and elbow grease that is frankly terrifying, so realistically it’s not a viable substitute to replace the moulded, mixed plastic bottles and tubs with additional dosing balls that most commercial laundry detergent brands rely on.

Instead, try Sapindus soap nuts. These are dried fruit shells containing a natural soap harvested from the Sapindus bush, a shrub related to the lychee, and are very easy to use in place of regular washing liquids or tabs: simply take a small handful of soap nuts, place in a small cotton drawstring bag and shove in the drum of your washing machine. The soap nuts can be bought in some health food stores or from online retailers in a 5 kg sack – that should keep you going! Visit soapnuts.co.uk.

You could also switch to using washing powder from cardboard boxes.

Alternatives to plastic toothbrushes

Plastic toothbrushes are difficult – especially the ones that contain a battery and therefore must be removed from the recycling belt (batteries are the biggest cause of fires in recycling depots). Put these in the bin, as we want them to be dealt with properly: lightweight, durable and streamlined, they are almost made for oceans and can travel thousands of miles. Next time, make a better choice: my latest toothbrush is a bamboo version (albeit with nylon bristles) from savesomegreen.co.uk.

Say NO to . . . microbeads

About those microbead products. Get rid of them. Now. These are the exception to the wait-and-finish rule. Confine these to their tubes and tubs and bin them (again, these are obviously not recyclable) rather than using them up. We’re taking drastic action because we don’t want to contribute any more microbeads to an ocean that now contains an estimated five trillion bits of microplastic.

As I write, the age of the mass use of microbeads as a cheap filler, spearheaded by multinational cosmetics companies (at its peak, every year 680 tonnes of microbeads were used in cosmetic products for the UK market) is thankfully coming to an end. Too small to be captured by municipal sewage treatment works, billions have washed into watercourses and found their way into the world’s oceans. The manufacture of rinse-off products containing microbeads was banned by UK legislation in January 2018, but retailers were only obliged to stop selling them by the end of July 2018. The best-before dates mean that many of these products will live on long after the on-sale ban, so check your bathroom cabinet and any holiday cosmetics.

You’re looking for rinse-off formulas: particularly skin exfoliators, but check for shower gels, toothpastes and moisturisers that may all contain microbeads too. Telltale ingredients to look out for include: polyethylene, polypropylene, polyethylene terephthalate, polymethyl methacrylate, polylactic acid and nylon. These are the most common forms of synthetic microbeads. Be alert for pictures of bubbles on the packaging, and boasts of ultra-deep cleansing: code for ‘contains microbeads’. If you’re unsure, check older products listed in the UK section of the database beatthemicrobead.org. And if you’re reading this on holiday and have bought products while abroad, check the relevant section on the database, bearing in mind that your host country may not have microbead legislation.

Replace your products with reformulated microbead-free versions or ones that contain biodegradable ingredients. There are lots of natural substitutes for microbeads including jojoba, pumice, salt and coffee grinds, and so many brilliant eco-friendly products (some brands never felt the need to introduce microplastics) that serve to highlight how tragic it is that the pollution was introduced in the first place. Unfortunately this is not where the story ends. Products categorised as ‘leave-on’, including sun creams, lipsticks and shimmering moisturisers (watch out for those containing glitter) are not targeted by the legislation and may still contain microplastics. If you’re a consumer of cosmetics, always check the ingredients. Better still, switch your allegiance to an ethical or eco brand that would never, and has never, used microplastics in their products.

Switch to soap bars

The giant personal care brands that I’m afraid must be held responsible for filling our oceans with microbeads have also encouraged us to migrate from good old-fashioned bars of soap towards more expensive, bottled liquid soap and gels which are, surprise, surprise, abundantly packaged in oil-based plastic bottles. Many of these do not make it into recycling because they are made from strange and difficult plastics, and some contain extra pumps and complicated dispensers.

Move in the opposite direction and go back to bars of soap. For extra brownie points, buy an eco-friendly soap wrapped in paper rather than a plasticised wrapper. If you hate the ectoplasm that soap leaves on the side of the sink, buy a ceramic or natural resin soap dish.

Go naked!

Follow the rather startling command from cosmetics brand Lush. From toothpaste in jars, conditioner and shampoo in bars rather than bottles and a cheeky soap produced in the shape of a plastic soap dispenser, Lush has pioneered plastic-free, or ‘naked’ in Lush parlance. One shampoo bar provides up to a hundred hair washes, so that displaces the equivalent of three 200 ml bottles of standard liquid shampoo.64 The brand is loved by kids and young adults, and has the added benefit of being low-cost and easy to track down – you can smell the stores a mile off. This is not because they are fans of olfactory marketing, pumping out perfumes into the outdoor environment, but simply because their ebulliently scented products are unwrapped. Transported to your own home, this also saves on air freshener!

Switch to cloth nappies

Eight million disposable nappies are shovelled into landfill in the UK daily, and – regardless of what it might claim on the plastic packaging, and some do make claims of biodegradability – here they will fester for hundreds of years. Waste materials need oxygen to biodegrade, and there’s not much of that in landfill.

Cloth nappies conjure up images of babies’ bottoms swathed in white terry-cotton squares secured by oversized safety pins like in Call the Midwife. But today’s reusable nappies offer a number of different and much more practical, washable and reusable options, made from varying naturally absorbent materials such as bamboo and hemp. Some 2.7 kg of raw materials are used in a full-time set of reusable nappies, as opposed to 120 kg if a child is in disposables.

The initial financial outlay might feel steep, but over the long term the investment compares favourably to the cost of disposable nappies. If you balk at the upfront costs of investing in two to three years’ supply of nappies, there are also local ‘nappy library’ schemes which offer budget-friendly options. To help evaluate reusable nappy options, go to Go Real (goreal.org.uk).

Switch to cardboard toys

As a doting and easily manipulated aunty, I am forever being manoeuvred into toy shops and down the toy aisle in supermarkets by my nieces and nephew, who talk me into buying them plastic tat as a matter of urgency. I feel guilty. Not only do I know their parents hate yet more plastic coming into the house, but also I really don’t want another generation to get hooked on plastic.

I wonder, then, if Nintendo, surprisingly, has answered all our prayers. I had high hopes for this year and our mission to turn the tide on plastic, but I hadn’t reckoned on Nintendo making it quite this cool. Labo, the brand’s range of cardboard toys, is a game-changer in every sense. It features a range of pop-out sheets of colour-coded templates, called Toy-Cons, made from regular cardboard as opposed to plastic. With rubber bands, string and a lot of patience, these are constructed into all sorts of amazing toys, including a remote-controlled car, a giant bug, a small piano and a fishing rod. Then they’re brought to life by slotting in a games console, the Nintendo Switch. It is being touted as the toy that will revolutionise the video game market, and it seems to have single-handedly dealt a major death blow to plastic. Wow.