The plastic challenge - week three

This week's shop was pretty successful.  I bought quite a bit of meat including some for my grandmother.  She decided she wanted hers in a container rather than in a plastic bag - it's catching on.  Fortunately our local butcher is extremely supportive and is more than happy to fill up my own containers.

We went shopping on Saturday for some more vegetables, and the one thing we didn't come back with (aside from peas of course) was a cauliflower.  We were in Waitrose and all the cauliflowers are in a plastic bag.  We know that it is the same in Sainsbury's.  The last cauliflower I bought was in Whole Foods Market where they are not in plastic bags.  We could maybe have found one at the market, unpackaged but we decided we would do without as we had bought sprouts in one of our own Onya Weigh bags.

The one bit of plastic we came back with this week was a tub of Philadelphia cheese.  I've decided this purchase is exempt from my plastic challenge as I buy it for making cheesecake or tiramisu which is a good way of using up leftover/stale cake.  We had half a chocolate log in the fridge which had really been there long enough so it got mashed up into the base for tiramisu and soaked in Tia Maria and strong coffee.  Then I whipped up the Philadelphia with some icing sugar and spread that on top and covered it in grated chocolate. It is now all eaten up as pudding after Sunday lunch.

Making tiramisu out of the leftover chocolate log

There was some extra chocolate sauce left over from the chocolate log, and so I turned this into a fridge cake.  This was another plastic challenge as I have up to now made my fridge cake by lining a loaf tin with cling film.  This was easily overcome though, by using a pork pie tin which has a loose bottom, lined round the edge with some Bake-o-glide.  It worked really well and was easier than the cling film method.

My new method for making fridge cake

So why do I consider the Philadelphia cheese packaging to be ok?  Well, it is most certainly reusable in our house.  I always keep the empty pots, wash them out and reuse them for example for snacks like peanuts and raisins or grated carrot and celery sticks which I take when I am working away from home and Junior Daughter takes to school.  There is no other plastic packaging other than the tub itself.

Mid week I decided I needed to buy my cat food as they say you should introduce new cat food gradually.  I did buy the Countrywide brand and the cats like it. So again more plastic, but at least it is in a useful bag.

Here's the Pitt Purchased plastic tally to date:

2 toothpaste tubes with lids
2 plastic bubbles from the battery packaging

In addition, but with plans to make use of the plastic:

1 tub with lid from Philadelphia cheese
1 bag from cat food washed out, dried and back in use.

I have also pulled out of my plastic store a small plastic bag when I've needed one. It was from apples. I'll be keeping this and no doubt reusing it again, because apples from now on will only be purchased loose.

Shopping Naked

It has been maybe ten years now that the Pitt family have only needed to put their 'general waste' bin out for collection once or twice in a year and even then it hasn't had much in it.  This was the photo of our entire residual waste for 2013.

Residual Waste for 2013

Now, it helps, of course, living in West Oxfordshire, where there really isn't very much at all that can't be recycled in your kerbside collection boxes - and they even take flyaway plastics as long as they are bagged up so they don't fly away during the collection process.  I've also actively taken steps to think about my residual waste each year and have tried to avoid buying things that can't be reused, recycled, composted or burnt on my stove - or things that have packaging that can't be recycled, reused etc.  And I've done that for a while now, so zero waste has become a habit.

But, this morning I put out four black boxes each of which was fairly full of recyclables. I'm pretty sure I put out four boxes, if not five, the week before and similar the week before that.  That's a lot of packaging for one family.  I have taken in the recycling from the cricket club annual dinner and we also had a rather large 18th birthday party, but it really has none-the-less got my attention. So I decided that over the next few weeks I'm going to really try hard to reduce the amount of packaging I amass.

We have for a long time bought much of our fruit and vegetables loose and last year I converted a patch of garden to grow salad herbs in order to provide unpackaged salad leaves.  My local butcher will accept my various reusable plastic boxes for when I buy meat.  I've been experimenting with making homemade snacks, particularly to reduce food waste as well as to reduce packaging.  But there are still so many things that come in a plastic bag.

I came across this write-up of Whole Foods Markets supermarket chain on the plasticisrubbish.com blog and it dawned on me that on one of my now very occasional journeys that I still make by car I drive right past the one in Cheltenham.  So today, I went prepared with a reusable shopping bag and my tiny bag of 'Onya Weigh Bags' - which are reusable, washable very lightweight mesh bags and checked out the Cheltenham branch of Whole Foods Market.

The selection of fruit and veg looked very inviting, but I had come to investigate those cupboard store ingredients like dried fruit, cereals, rice and pasta that are rarely found sold loose.

I came away with the following haul:

1. UK sourced jumbo oats at £1.09/kg.  The last box of oats I bought - because it was the only one I could see that was UK sourced with entirely recyclable packaging - is currently £2.70/kg in Sainsbury's.

2. Organic arborio rice £2.99/kg.  The last box I bought was priced at £2.20/kg from Sainsbury's.

3. Brown basmati rice at £2.39/kg.  Sainsbury's brown basmati rice is £1.80/kg

4. Organic raisins £5.99/kg. Sainsbury's organic raisins are £5.00/kg but the raisins I usually buy there are £3.00/kg.

5. Dry roasted peanuts £5.39/kg.  The cheapest dry roasted peanuts in Sainsbury's are £4.40/kg but I wouldn't buy them as the packaging isn't recyclable even in West Oxfordshire.  The ones I'd likely buy were £6.70/kg.

Price wise, it seems you win some you loose some.  If I'd bought around a kilo of each item then given the 30p discount Whole Foods Market gave me for using my own bags then I paid £1.15 more than I'd have paid buying what I'd normally buy at Sainsbury's or 85p less if I'd have chosen organic raisins.  I did a taste test on the raisins I had left at home and the ones I'd just bought and the latter were definitely tastier.  I doubt that's just down to freshness as raisins don't last long in our house.

So price-wise I felt it was ok and quality wise and packaging wise I'd give it top marks.  I love the fact that I would soon know exactly how much I can buy to fill my storage containers for each item and I loved the fact that I was left with no packaging to recycle.  I also cheekily took the opportunity to check out my Onya bags on the scales compared to the paper bags the shop provides and my Onya bags weighed a tiny bit less.  I will be shopping there again next time I pass.

I was only disappointed that there was no bulk buy plastic free pasta.  So it looks like I will have to try and make my own :)