It's a wrap: Giving up plastic for a month

Christine Jeavans, BBC News 1 Sep 08;

A month ago I announced I was giving up plastic for the whole of August.

Little did I know that what seemed like a simple, if somewhat extreme, idea would lead me into such intricate areas as whether apples sold loose are more wasteful than those in bags, the environmental pros and cons of a wooden toothbrush and whether bicarbonate of soda is an effective deodorant (it is - at least on the one day I tried it).

My aim was to try to live for a month without buying anything new made from plastic or wrapped in plastic. I was able to keep and use the plastic I already owned but if anything ran out I would have to buy a plastic-free replacement.

Plastics are hugely useful and versatile and the goal of the experiment was not to demonise the material itself.
But disposing of an ever-growing amount of plastic does pose a problem as the UK's recycling infrastructure is not yet geared up to deal with our mixed plastics waste.

This is due to improve in the next couple of years but even so, it looks like we will be landfilling the majority of our plastic waste for a significant time to come.

To find out how much my household - my husband, toddler son and I - usually contribute to this plastic mountain, I kept an audit of a normal month's plastic waste.

It totalled 603 items of which 120 were disposable nappies and most of the rest were food and drink packaging.

So my challenge was to find out whether it was possible to live a normal life without adding to my own plastic waste pile at all.

The short answer was no. I did not manage to eliminate plastic waste in August, however, I did cut it by 80% to 116 items.

Battles, widgets, balloons

The difference would have been even greater if I had got to grips better with washable nappies. I did use them most of the time but we still ended up falling back on disposables - albeit "eco-disposables" made from corn-starch plastic - when I hadn't got the washing and drying organised well enough.



So 63 of those 116 items were nappies, leaving just 53 other pieces of plastic ranging from a couple of milk bottles to some beer widgets to a stick for a balloon.

Some of the problems I or others foresaw did not materialise: we did not have huge amounts of food waste - in fact we probably wasted less than usual.

However, I suspect that this is because food shopping became such a tricky task that I was very keen to ensure that every last scrap of cheese or leaf of cabbage was used up before having to buy some more.

That said, I did not have to spend hours on the hunt for plastic-free food. Yes, I tended to visit the butcher and local market stalls rather than the supermarket but asking a stallholder for a pound of spuds, four apples, a few onions etc actually took less time than playing trolley slalom in the aisles.

My family and I did have to forgo plenty of our usual fare, though. No yoghurt, no biscuits (I know, I could have made some but I didn't get around to it, ok?), no celery, no crisps, no strawberries or raspberries.

Cheese was out unless wrapped in wax or paper, as were takeaway meals.

I did relent on the apple juice when out and about as that is top of my son's list of priorities (along with trains and lemurs).

I also drew the line at homemade toothpaste - having tried some I had concocted - and we got a tube of our usual brand.

Back to black (bags)

So, with August over and all restrictions lifted, will I go back to my old plastic-using ways?

Yes and no. I will be glad to get bin bags back - although enough people commenting on the blog which accompanied this project recommended a bokashi bin for dealing with waste to encourage me to give that a try.

And a more normal food shopping pattern will be welcome. As the packaging industry is at pains to point out, plastic is often used to wrap food because it is the optimum choice for protecting the product and transporting with low cost and carbon emissions.

However, living for a month without plastic has changed the way that I think about disposable items, no matter what material they are made from.

After all, even a biodegradable paper cup requires resources to produce and will take energy to recycle. Or if it ends up in landfill it risks breaking down in poor conditions which may produce the potent greenhouse gas, methane.

I have got into the habit of taking a reusable water bottle with me wherever I go and I now keep a mug at work - both were easy changes to make and I'm sure I'll keep them up.

The idea of taking my own reusable containers to shops such as the butchers or even the local takeaway curry house - as suggested by some "zero waste" enthusiasts on the blog - feels a little odd but it is logical and maybe something we will all be doing in future years, just like the way that reusable bags have taken off.

Real bread

We found we prefer bread from the bakers rather than the pre-sliced loaf so we'll be staying with that on grounds of taste if nothing else.

And the milk delivery can stay as it's very convenient, although it's good to be able to top up from the shop round the corner.

The wooden toothbrush, however, was not a winner for me and will be redeployed as a mini-scrubbing brush.

The big pile of plastic I collected in the previous month will be recycled as far as I am able to. This is something which should become easier in the next few years as Britain's first mixed plastics recycling plants start up.

And with a rising oil price and dwindling resources, there is even talk of mining landfill sites for the old plastic to turn into fuel - the first conference about this will be held in London this autumn (see Internet links on right).

Could plastic waste be eventually upgraded from the cheap stuff we throw away to our most valuable asset?

Maybe I should hang on to those all those bottles, bags and tubs a while longer.