A Month Without Plastic Week 4 / 5

January 22ND

Very little to say now as I'm well into the plastic reduction mode I've come to the conclusion that it is not possible nor feesible to eradicate plastic totally so it's going to be as much as possible a gradual reduction with the eventual aim of zero plastic but that will mean drastic changes such as no milk.

We had the bin emptied on Wednesday as my neighbour put it out for me whilst I was out but it was only about 4" in the bottom. For what was in there you could have put it in a dog poop bag I guess let alone a plastic carrier, heaven forbid. I've even trained my local veg shop to continue to provide the paper bags but my real objective is to get him to remove the plastic bags on a roll he has. I will keep whinging until he does.

As I say nothing has happened to report to the world against plastic. I haven't bought anything in plastic except milk since the last posting and when I went to the butchers yesterday I had my plastic boxes in my bag and was being served by a new staff member who was going to put some chops into a plastic bag to the cry of "No he does't use plastic bags" from another staff member. This was before I had the time to get my pork box out of the bag... canvas bag that is.

January 26TH

Still not a lot to report except bought two bags of mince for the dog so that's another 40g of plastic to add to the bin as it's type 6 and our council don't recycle it at present.

I really must find some meat to mince up myself as we use one bag of mince a day for our dog so that works out at an amazing 7.3 kg of plastic each year. The trouble is that at one bag a day you don't realise the impact on the plan but the greater yearly picture is quite astounding.

January 28TH

Been on a big shop tonight for the next two weeks and spent £70 including £14 for minced meat for the dog. Sadly this was the only things in plastic but that's my target to focus on now and buy meat and mince it myself. I'll have to fine it at a cost of less than £4 a kilo to make a saving in cost. I say saving in cost over saving in plastic because I can't buy stuff that is more expensive just for the fact it's not in plastic. Sad as it seems but I don't have a choice.
Speaking of choice, Lush, the cosmetic body products shop uses only recycled paper in their bags and the last one I got at Christmas had 3 spaces on so that if you get three stamps on it for reusing it you get a free soap or something.... The previous carrier I had from them had the date of 2006 written inside by me so I reckon it must have been reused at least 12 to 15 times in the intervening years.... Sad i know but hey it keeps me out of mischief.

January 30TH

Seems sort of sad now as the sparkle has seemed to go out of this trial now as I regard it as "normal" to reduce the use of plastic. Stil no cheaper versions of milk bottles.