The what, the why and the how

This blog will document our attempts, as a family, to reduce our plastic usage. I will write about our search for groceries and household items that are packaged without plastic and the alternative products that we have made at home.

Prompted by a book I was given for Christmas called ‘No More Plastic’ by Martin Dorey, I wanted to reassess our household’s plastic usage and look at ways to reduce this. Martin Dorey is an advocate of two minute solutions, as lots of small changes add up to big ones, and this is something that I felt mirrored my approach to plastic reduction to date.

Now living sustainably is not something new to our family. We have made changes over the years to reduce our plastic usage and to reuse and recycle as much as possible. Indeed, a search of my emails reveals that I first bought a reusable bag in 2007 (I still have it and use it today) and we started our organic veg box deliveries in 2005 using several companies since then and ending up with deliveries from Riverford today. More recently we have ditched clingfilm and switched to using bar soap instead of liquid soap.

The changes we have made so far are the easier ones. We have tackled the low hanging fruit. Now it it time to take a closer look at our habits and our family’s plastic usage and examine where we can reduce or eliminate it. However, this has to take place within the time we have available in a busy household with two working parents. We just don’t have the time to shop multiple times a week at multiple shops so we will be looking at changes we can make to our weekly supermarket shop and how we can periodically buy other products online, at zero waste shops and other retailers.