Reduce plastic waste :: PlasticLess.com

Today I bought raw milk from a vending machine. I am just visiting so I didn’t have my own container. The dairy also has a vending machine for sterile containers. Unfortunately, all but the bottom row of these empty containers are plastic. The price of a new plastic milk bottle from the vending machine is high enough to strongly encourage reuse. I was lucky enough to show up just when the farmer was switching out the stainless steel milk tank that sits inside the vending machine with a fresh one. He generously gave me a free glass bottle. The cost from the vending machine was 1 Euro.

There are a few things that I really like about this business model. Mostly I love the way that it encourages the reuse of containers.

I am not a raw milk advocate in particular. I think consumers should have the right to eat or drink just about anything they want as long as they take the responsibility to be informed about the benefits and risks associated with what they are putting in their bodies. Producers bear some responsibilities too. For a long time the majority of dairy producers have taken a ‘better safe than sorry’ attitude about pasteurization. If a large dairy cooperative did not pasteurize their milk, the safety of the milk would rely on whoever was the weakest link in the supply chain. The milk that I bought comes from one farm that has been operating these machines for several years. It was delicious.

I bought potatoes in a big jute bag this morning. In retrospect, the greener choice may have been filling up a shopping bag with local potatoes. I am faced with shopping on a tighter budget these days and these seemed like a good value. There are lots of blog posts floating around about how to live green and frugal at the same time. Making greener choices and saving money at the same time can be a bit of a juggling act. The commercial food industry sees green as a value added part of their business. If money was not an issue for me I would be paying the premium for organic food all the time. Put your hand up if money is not an issue.

Here are some suggestions that might help the planet and your bank balance:

Minimize food waste through careful planning and list making. When perishable items do go bad, make a note to buy less the next time. Shopping at markets where you can pick over the produce yourself will reduce the amount of waste that you deal with at home.

Comparison shopping isn’t all about price. Find out which vendors carry local produce. Sometimes a compromise between distance and price is in order. For instance, we buy Sicilian oranges this time of year even though there are local ones available. The distance is just around the 100km mark and they get pretty cheap in the middle of the season.

Plan your meals around seasonal produce. As much as we love strawberries, we are willing to forgo the joy for ten months out of the year to save money and fossil fuels.

You can reduce the amount of pesticides you consume by choosing varieties of produce that are not subjected to as much of it in conventional agriculture. Sadly, potatoes are on the list of 12 foods to avoid if you are worried about pesticides.

Prepare the bulk of your meals at home from scratch.

Eat less meat. If you love meat and you have a handful of tried and true meat heavy meals that you don’t want to give up a good way to accomplish this is to commit yourself to a Meatless Monday. We haven’t done that, but we typically have more than one meatless day. High protein produce is less expensive and better for the environment than meat. During our year in Bizerte, we developed a taste for chickpea sandwiches.

I am not a zealot when it comes to buying ecologically responsible food. Our first priority is to provide a balanced diet for my family. I do make a conscious effort to keep my eye our for ways to do that in ways that are both cheaper and greener.

This post hasn’t had a lot to do with reducing plastic waste. When it comes to food I look for every affordable plastic free option and when there are none I consider whether that item is important enough to compromise. The best example I can think of where I spend extra to avoid plastic packaging is with pasta. Barilla, the BEST PASTA IN THE WORLD, is available in boxes. The less expensive alternatives are in plastic bags.

It doesn’t slice. It doesn’t dice. I use a knife for that. It crushes stuff and it will do so for the rest of my life without using one watt of electricity. Hey, I already wrote a post about my mortar and pestle. It still makes me happy.

Two other tools that I use to process food are my bare hands. I have recently been on a biscuit making jag and I used them for the whole process. I recently learned to fill a bowl with hot soapy water beforehand so I don’t get the taps all gunky.

I am reusing a statement made by Jason Sweeney as my title for this post. Those three words have sent my mind in a hundred different directions thinking about what impact the human pursuit of perfection has on this planet. Most of it isn’t good, some of it is involves plastic.

The concept was still rattling around in my head when I went to the kitchen this morning to make the kids some French toast with cooked fruit topping. The apples that I bought on Friday are not perfect. They look like the apples that I used to scrounge from abandoned homesteads in Canada. They taste delicious.

Consumers in the developed world supposedly want perfect apples. The customer is always right, and those customers get pesticides, genetic engineering and lots of protective packaging.

Photo credit: Brett L

I am living in a unique economy here in Tunisia. One big difference that I see is the persistence of returnable glass in the supply chain of liquid consumer goods. In much of the western world, this is something from days gone by. The only niches where it has persisted is with beer and to a lesser extent wine.

Three doors down from where I live, a typical neighborhood shop sells cooking oil, vinegar, bleach and detergents in identical bottles that are delivered and picked up by the same truck. The soft drink suppliers bring both plastic and glass to the store, but they only pick up the glass.

My casual observation is that close to half of the non beverage trade of liquids is carried out using returnable glass.

Plastic and aluminum appears to have returnable glass beat in the beverage trade. I could be wrong about this. When I attended a wedding reception this summer, I was served a 200ml returnable glass bottle of soft drink. Most small stores have soft drinks available in both returnable and disposable containers. Local customers are often not charged the deposit with the understanding that they will bring the bottle back to the store in a timely fashion.

It’s actually a lot like North America 30 years ago. I would love to see someone do a careful study of the environmental costs of the two options in a small economy.

One way that I avoid plastic packaging is to feed myself and my family lots of whole, fresh fruit every day. Here is a slide show of what we had over the course of a week

This is all relatively local and relatively in season. I hardly ever buy bananas. Besides the transport issue, all the banana boxes come wrapped thick plastic that I often see blowing around the streets.

I prefer to go to places where I can pick through the fruit myself. I had to learn this the hard way during strawberry season. I jumped at the chance to pay 1/2 the going price only to find that I had to throw about 1/2 of them away. When I living in Gozo, the strawberries were sold in plastic boxes. I was relieved when I found out that the fruit seller would take them back to reuse.

We give our children a small weekly allowance because we want them to learn some valuable lessons about money. Corporations provide them with goods and services, but they aren’t all that interested in teaching my children valuable lessons.

We do impose some limits on what our kids buy for a number of reasons such as safety and nutrition, but we try not to be so strict as to diminish the idea that the money is for their discretionary spending. They listen to me give a speech every time they come in the house with a plastic soft drink bottle. I am an accomplished public speaker, but they seem to see this as negative reinforcement nonetheless. They opt for glass bottles or cans more often than not.

Other than the plastic bottles, I mostly let things slide. There are a few things that bother me.

Kinder Surprises are my enemy #1 when it comes to junk food. Thankfully, my kids have outgrown them. Kinder makes a candy bar without the surprise. It comes in a plastic wrapper inside which there are two fingers of candy in their own individual plastic wrappers.

Individual serving cakes are another pet peeve. My teenage son considers one cake to be 1/2 a serving.

The brand name imported candy bars are bad value and they probably have a bigger environmental cost than the locally manufactured treats.

Giving the kids and allowance and having them be less environmentally responsible than me is a situation that I am going to just live with. If I felt like something had to be done, there are a few options.

I could spend some of my own money to stock the cupboards with fair trade organic chocolate bars in foil wrappers, home baked cakes and soft drinks in returnable bottles. I don’t know what the kids would buy if all their sugar cravings were being met in house.

I already make a point of providing a big cooked breakfast on a regular basis. French toast made from local bread and eggs comes plastic free. I make a topping from local seasonal fruit cooked in a pan with sugar that I buy by the kg without packaging. Sending the kids to school stuffed to the gills with carbs and protein might prevent the purchase of a few items of plastic packaged junk food.

A simple option to reduce the environmental impact of my kids’ allowance would be to reduce or eliminate the allowance itself. This would be a microcosm of what some people were saying about the economic crisis when it hit. Having less money to spend should always translate to less waste.

A very difficult option would be to dictate what the kids could and could not purchase. This would make allowance pointless. It wouldn’t make me very popular either.

I am not an expert on this subject, please do yourself a favor and seek out people who are. I just wanted to point out that a great way to cut down on food packaging is to have the food sitting on the vine or under the ground just outside your backdoor.

I wrote about gardening with less plastic two summers ago. Not much has changed since then, apart from backyard gardening becoming super cool and important thanks to people like Michelle Obama.

I didn’t grow these tomatoes myself. The landlord that I had back in Gozo gave them to us and we dried them in the sun with lots of salt. They make great additions to salads or pizza.

I have to confess that I have never thrown a party for dozens of people. I am an introvert. If I were to wake up as an entirely different person and decide to have a big bash for all of the acquaintances that I would call my friends, I would try to figure out an alternative to the disposable plastic beer glass.

Disposable plastic beer glasses are recommended by many authorities on serving alcohol at large parties…

…You need to invest in some plastic beer cups. The investment is relatively cheap. You can get a large stack of plastic beer cups for about the same price you are going to pay for a bottle of dish detergent to clean all those glasses.

The savings in time is astronomically higher. Instead of washing and drying all those glasses, just pull out a black plastic bag, sweep them all into it, and you’re done.

I think the most obvious alternative to plastic beer glasses is to have your guests drink straight from returnable glass bottles. The only drawback that I can see with this is the safety issue. I attended an Agricultural College in Canada. I saw a lot of beer drinking at pubs and events. Most of these events did not involve disposable cups and I can only remember a handful of bottle related injuries. One or two of them were very memorable.

A slightly more inventive alternative would be to ask your guests to bring their own drinking vessel. Those wacky medieval recreationists do that all the time.

Serving beer from plastic laundry detergent jugs is a step in the wrong direction. Don’t do it.

If your party is commemorating something important, you could shell out for keepsake glassware. If you bring home a beer glass or champagne flute from someone’s special day, don’t have it sitting on your windowsill filled with plant cuttings that you are trying to root when they visit you after the divorce. I’m just sayin’.

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I presently live in a country that does not have any McDonald’s outlets. I had to check online to find out the current theme for the 1/4 pound of plastic that kids get with their cholestafest.

Happy Meal Toys are bad. I’m not going to mince words the way they mince cow body parts. Giving kids a toy with their meal seems like a recipe for an eating disorder. Paying people in Asia a pittance to design and produce a toy that has some fleeting pop culture significance but that will last for a thousand years is absurd. Sometimes they don’t even do a very good job.

The worst thing about happy meal toys is that they teach small children that acquiring plastic crap is a good thing. It’s not a good thing and the young children that are getting these toys today are eventually going to have to deal with plastic waste along with a host of other negative environmental impacts of human activity. The dad who wrote the blog post in the above link said that his kid played with her toy for 30 seconds before she got tired of it. 30 seconds of entertainment? A single use plastic shopping bag could entertain a kid that long (BUT THEY ARE NOT TOYS)

I seem to remember these toys being optional and I certainly hope that McDonald’s employees ask before putting them in the box. Just say no to plastic toys at fast food restaurants.