Can you really have a plastic-free kitchen?
Is your kitchen bin or recycling overflowing with plastic bags, containers and produce wrapping? Plastic has become so commonplace that it’s easy to overlook how much of it you use and to forget that it doesn’t just disappear when it leaves your home.
More than 320 million tonnes of plastic were produced globally in 2015, over 40 percent of which was single-use. Recycling helps to tackle the problem, but as Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and Anita Rani explain in BBC One’s War on Plastic, the plastic you put in a recycling bin doesn’t always get recycled.
How can you ditch plastic in favor of more sustainable kitchen habits? It could be simpler than you think.
Which bag is best?
Once upon a time, the average person in England got through 140 single-use plastic carrier bags a year. We have slashed this by a staggering 86 percent, partly due to the plastic bag tax and a heightened awareness of the detrimental effects of plastic on the environment. But major retailers in England still sold 1.75 billion plastic bags between April 2017 and April 2018.
When it comes to choosing a bag, do you know your options?
It takes more than four times as much energy to produce a paper bag as it does a plastic bag. Paper also weighs more than plastic, making transport emissions higher.
The Environment Agency finds that paper bags need to be used at least three times to have lower global warming potential than standard plastic bags used only once. But paper bags do not tend to be reused. However, the paper is recycled at a higher rate than plastic, so landfill is less of a problem.
By comparison, a bag for life, made of low-density polyethylene, needs to be used at least four times. While this seems doable, it still adds to plastic pollution if you throw it away. Cotton bags need to be used 131 times, but they last well and cut down on plastic pollution dramatically.
Whatever type of bags you use, the key to minimizing environmental impact is to use them as often as possible until they break and then return them to a supermarket bag collection point, which many chains now provide. Lots of these ‘bins’ also accept plastic wrap from bread, cereal boxes, toilet roll, freezer bags, ring-joiners and lots of other single-use plastic items. Ask in-store if you’re not sure if your shop has one or what it accepts.
s plastic ever better?
Some vegetables, such as cucumbers, bananas, peppers and potatoes, and meats such as beef, can last much longer when wrapped in plastic. This is due to the oxygen-free environment or micro-climate that can be created.
So which is worse for the environment – plastic or food waste? We enter the plastic paradox.
According to anti-waste charity WRAP, increasing the shelf life of produce by just one day would save UK shoppers up to £500 million per year by cutting back on their food waste.
One way to avoid the need for long-life fresh ingredients is to shop for them locally so that you can easily pop back when you want something. “Veg box deliveries and local markets or greengrocers are a way of ditching packaging while supporting local businesses”, says Emma Priestland, plastics campaigner at Friends of the Earth.
Many major UK supermarkets have pledged to reduce avoidable unrecyclable plastic packaging while slashing the amount of food waste produced. So in the future, we could start seeing better alternatives and new solutions to plastic that increase shelf-life.
The key is to use all your belongings until they break. When you have to buy something new, weigh up the options and decide what works best for you and the planet. Kathryn Kellogg says “of course, we don’t live in a perfect zero-waste and plastic-free world. We can only do the best we can.”
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