15th July 2019

Today I'm about half way through the Plastic Free July Challenge. It's my last day of vacation and I thought that my post was going to be about travel, as I've just had a lovely weekend in France drinking champagne! However, I run the risk of it being a long rant instead and well, as I need to get rid of some of my irritation today I decided that the only sensible thing to do was to pour an Edinburgh rhubarb gin and ginger ale into my glass, and my woes out online! Tomorrow we can talk travel instead.

I've mentioned before how I take my recycling to the unit outside of Sainsbury's. Sometimes in the past I've had to return 2 or 3 times because the unit has been full to overflowing. This is both great to see that people are recycling but it's incredibly frustrating for someone who walks their recycling to the centre and so can't just leave it in the boot of the car until the next time I'm there. I have to take it with me shopping and then take it home and repeat the process until they have emptied it and I can deposit my recycling. I don't know what has been going on recently but there must have some good parties in Collier's Wood as today when I got to the glass recycling section I was greeted with this...

The unit was completely full and so people had left their bottles on top of the bin and at the side of it. Occasionally when this happens, the bins are actually accessible from the other side and so I walked around and to my horror, was met with this...

So, not accessible from the other side. To add insult to injury, most of the bottles were in carrier bags which of course can't be recycled and there was lots of other waste mixed in with this too and I of course can't be certain that it will be separated out when they come to collect them. You'll see on the left hand side of the picture the white waste. When I went to look at it it was polystyrene sheets.

I took a close up of what can't be disposed of in the units and they clearly say 'No thank you' to polystyrene.

I'd like to think (if that's the right phrase) that it was illiteracy rather than laziness that resulted in that but I don't think any situation could be classed as good when you're hoping for the reason for something to be due to lack of basic education.

Anyway, from here I headed into Sainsbury's. I've mentioned before that I joined a plastic free waste tips group on Facebook and people had mentioned that Sainsbury's was getting better with reducing the amount of plastic waste. I can only assume the people posting this were not shopping in Collier's Wood. I was still limited to only salad or beef tomatoes that weren't in packaging. Now they have nectarines etc. in I was looking forward to trying some, but if they're not packaged in plastic, you can only buy them priced per item and at 40p each, that was a little too much for what I wanted to pay. Oranges were 30p each. I could have bought pears and apples by weight but I figured I'd stick with my tinned fruit.

Having a bit more time to shop, I did do some comparisons and to avoid waste, you really are paying more. I needed mayonnaise which I knew I could buy in a jar, but the 85p jar of mayonnaise had plastic around the seal. To buy a version that didn't have a plastic seal I ended up spending £1.50 for a jar of the same weight. They sell without plastic seals so they're clearly not necessary and they're not there to protect the expensive products as it's the cheaper ones that have them.

I did find that Sainsbury's sweet chilli sauce comes in a glass bottle so hopefully it's on a par with Blue Dragon who changed to a plastic bottle. The cap is still plastic though but as overall that's much less plastic I did go for it.

I had forgotten how much I like the Lloyd Grossman pasta sauces as I generally make my own, but as I was wandering around rather than being incredibly focused on the items on my list I was reminded of these sorts of options and so got a couple that were on offer. They're in glass jars that are a great size for reusing for jams and marmalades so will work for Christmas presents. I got lots of other ideas for cooking sauces that were in glass jars that will be quick to make and with the addition of lots of veggies will mean I'm eating healthily but not producing plastic waste so that was good.

Anyway, I went to pay and had a really lovely guy on the till who was a bit baffled by my veggio bags, so I explained that they were my bags and they were reusable which meant I didn't have to use the stupidly thin and pointless plastic bags that Sainsbury's provides. He said that they were a great idea but Sainsbury's had done lots over the last year to reduce plastic waste and I quote 'now we charge we don't give out anywhere near as many carrier bags as we used to' and I think this just both riled me and made me sad in equal measure, because I realised that this is the view of most people. There is a global blind spot when it comes to plastic. I agreed with him that it was great, but they'd had no choice but to introduce a charge, it wasn't an initiative they had taken themselves. I explained about how avoiding plastic had limited choice in my options for fruit and veg and just how much Sainsbury's food came packaged in plastic, making it challenging for both someone like me who's doing plastic free July or anyone who's trying to reduce their plastic footprint. I realise it wasn't his fault and told him so but said that if he had any way of feeding back to his company how bad it was I would be grateful. I've written to them myself previously through Greenpeace surveys but of course, with so many people buying their goods, it makes little difference to them.

From there I went to M&S as I needed some tights for work. Because I buy a multipack they of course feel the need to wrap them in plastic inside the box so add on another 2 pieces of plastic waste to today's count.

I then saw two rats running across the bridge in the park on my way home so my wildlife count was up too!

And so, at the half way point I thought I'd had a little tally of the single use plastic that I've used/bought so far this month, be it intentionally or unintentionally:

1 plaster
2 compeed plasters
1 piece of cling film
1 jar label
12 little plastic veg stickers
2 plastic bags (that my shoes were in)
3 plastic stickers on the shoes
2 straws (one in wahaca and one in a drink whilst I was away at the weekend)
1 yogurt film (I'd bought some in a good quality tub that I'll be able to reuse but didn't think about the film...)
1 milk bottle
1 squash bottle
1 yeast carton lid
1 plastic hanger on my socks
1 plastic tag keeping the socks together
1 plastic lid on my sweet chilli sauce
2 plastic bags in my tights boxes
1 oat milk carton plastic lid
1 plastic glass (for the champagne on the way to France)
1 gift card I received for my birthday

So 36 pieces. By volume when crushed, probably around 3 cubic litres. I was going to save this statistic until the end of the month but it is so horrifying, I feel like I need to share it with you multiple times, Earlier in the year I went to talk at the British Library on plastic waste. One of the speakers was Daniel Webb who had moved to Margate and discovered that his options for recycling plastic were limited and he was told just to put his plastic waste in with his general household waste. After this, he went for a run along Margate coast and after seeing how much waste was in the sea he wondered if anything he'd ever thrown away had made it into the sea and decided to save every piece of plastic waste he generated over the year, but not modify his plastic waste use so that he could get a real feel for how much waste he produced (it was carefully washed prior to storage!). Over the course of the year he generated 4,490 individual pieces of waste. Of these:

60% was food packaging (salad and veg wrappers and bread bags)
93% was single use (4176)
8 items were made from biodegradable material
56 were made of recycled material

If you take him to be an average person, this means that UK produces around 293 billion (that's 293,000,000,000) pieces of plastic waste PER YEAR. That would fill and area with a footprint of Clapham Common and the height of the Shard PER YEAR. And that's just the UK. Based on Plastic Free July, if I continue to produce plastic waste at the same rate as I have over the last two weeks, I'll have generated 864 pieces of single use plastic myself, so around 19% of the average and I've tried hard to limit my plastic use. I guess I need to try harder.

This is one helluva big (hopefully at some point plastic-free) mountain to climb.