Plastic fantastic?

We posted a few weeks ago that we had given up buying things in plastic for Lent…or at least that we were trying to. We’ve been saving any plastic packaging that we have used over the time, as it’s virtually impossible to not buy anything in plastic. Also, the aim is more to raise our awareness of how much plastic we get through, than trying to cut it out completely. Here is the pile as of today:

You’ll note that it’s considerably bigger than the pile that we had when we first blogged. So what have been our biggest “failures”?

• Cheese – you’ll note that cheese packets make up a large proportion of the pile. However, we’re also buying Boirsin (wrapped in foil and cardboard) and brie (wrapped in paper)
• Cleaning stuff – our washing up liquid ran out, as did hair conditioner…we had no options but to buy replacements which come in plastic
• Treats – we fancied a takeaway and went for pizza because that comes in cardboard…but the dips don’t! Also when we went to a recent gig (Kill It Kid at the Roundhouse – awesome!) our drinks were served in plastic pint glasses. We’ve also really struggled with chocolate biscuits – in the end we went for club biscuits as they have paper wrappers, but sadly the multipack packaging is plastic
• Fruit and veg – in general we’re doing ok with this, with the main plastic usage being the stickers that come on individual items (such as dudhis), but we did cave when, for the second week in a row, there were no paper bags to put mushrooms in at Sainsburys. At work I’ve been re-using a little plastic pot at the salad bar for several weeks, but it finally got too many cracks in, so I’ve had to get a new one, and the old one has joined the pile

So those are the places where we’ve been unable to avoid plastic usage completely, but there have been changes to lifestyle. We’re now making our own bread the whole time; whilst the packet mix stuff comes entirely in paper, we have yet to get it to rise properly in our breadmaker, so we’re sticking to putting together the recipes ourselves. Coffee is being rationed as any replacement will have to come in some form of plastic, so we’re getting through more tea. We’ve been constantly on UHT milk now for several weeks, and we’ve had very little meat at all (I really miss sausages and mash!). Our herb and spice collection is also looking a little depleted as we can’t replace the jars once empty, due to the plastic lids. Pasta, rice and cous cous sadly only come in plastic (aside from Sainsburys basics lasagne sheets!), so this has possibly been our most radical shift in diet – we now rely more on potatoes as the source of carbs in our meals.

Overall we’re quite glad that we’ve only got 2 weeks to go, but I think that the awareness of our reliance on plastic will remain far beyond Easter.