A month without plastic.... conclusion.

February 2ND

The month of January has come to an end and as such the challenge of no plastic also ends.

It was quite clear from the first day of shopping that this would be a Plastic REDUCTION CHALLENGE because an enourmous amount of plastic is used in todays food industry.

All along this challenge i aimed to reduce, reuse THEN recycle but my first dissapointment was milk. We drink a lot of milk and as such I looked for a doorstep delivery but the this was a no no from the first phone call. The milk had to come from the next town at least 15 to 30 miles or so away as our local depot was no longer viable many years ago and closed down so there was an issue of food miles. Secondly the cost of milk in proper glass milk bottles was 62 pence per pint. I mean come on, no bloody wonder the poor milkman is no longer doing so many doorstep deliveries. In a previous post I said we drank 3 pints a day but on counting we actually drink on average 3.8 pints a day. If our son is home from uni that will go to 5. So an average of 4 pints a day is 28 pints a week or 10220 pints a year. For doorstep deliveries the cost would be £6336. For poly cartons from the shops it would be £3654 !! I know I wanted to reduce my purchase of plastic milk cartons but come on spending an extra £3000 to do it is madness.

Thus I aim to reuse as many of my poly milk cartons as I can. I've got a lot of sugesstion for this but some to help on the way are making butter in them, cutting up and using for plant labels, making funnels out of them, bird seed fillers etc, etc.

My second dissapointment was the use of plastic for my dogs minced steak. He has a dodgy stomach and so we need to be careful of the amount of fat in his food. We found minced steak in 500g bags for £1.98 then it went up to £2.00 a bag. This is less than 8% fat so to reduce my use of this plastic, A grade 6 I'd need to mince my own which would be no problem but I'd need to find a supply of meat for less than £4 a kilo.... If you know of anywhere that sells steak at less than £4 a kilo let me know please.

Other than that there were no major dissapointments and it doesn't take long to "train" butchers, grocers, fishmongers etc that you don't want plastic bags. I mean it took me a week to actually buck up the courage to ask my fishmonger but then it was cool for all the rest. Within the second week I'd trained them to expect me to hand them a box marked beef, fish or pork etc and often one lass on the butchers stall would actually ask for the box to tare it out on the scales so I didn't even have to have greaseproof paper which I thought was cool.

Over the 4 weeks I had a total of approximatly 823g of plastic that I couldn't find a re use for, mainly the dog food wrappers but also the odd plastic tray from bacon because we wanted a bacon sarnie when only the Asda type shops were open.

Which is another point. In days of yore we shopped on a daily basis if there was a non working(outside the house)housewife or weekly on a saturday if the women were working. How on earth did we manage with shops only opening until 5 pm or 10 pm if it was the local corner shop. I mean, you couldn't get a pound of bacon at 9 pm on most nights could you... And maybe this is a way forward in this depression we are in now. To plan a weeks meals and stick to it. Buy all the ingredients and no more then either prepare daily or weekly and freeze. Maybe this will help cut down on the waste thrown away each week and the amount that comes out of our purses and wallets each week.

One other point is that it takes more time, effort and money to shop locally as opposed to doing one big shop at the likes of ASDA. It takes planning and time management. These are skills of which I need to hone and hone a lot but I'll get there in the end al being well.
On the whole I'd implore everyone to try the reduction of plastic for a month experiment. It certainly changed my views and I am one who already does an enourmous amount of environmental friendly shopping anyway.

This reduce plastic ethos will be continued from now on and even stepped up to badgering local shops to stop supplying plastic bags for fruit and veg. After all paper bags have done us proud for many a year before plastic arrived.