Putting a lid on it.

My younger son likes chocolate, and in particular he likes chocolate spread on toast in the morning. Every morning. Without fail. But the chocolate spread we get in the local Tesco comes in a glass jar with a plastic lid. Inside the plastic lid there is a plastic seal. Neither the lid nor the seal are recyclable.

For the first few days he bravely ate lemon curd on his toast, or homemade strawberry jam. But the initially muted complaints got louder and louder until a crisis point a few days ago.

His father undertook to find him chocolate spread in recyclable packaging. This was not straighforward. He visited every food shop in town until he finally found something in the Cambridge Cheese Shop. This something is disguised as shoe polish, in a sweet little tin, at much more that we would normally spend. I have to say that it is the best chocolate spread I have ever tasted: it is wasted on a 4-year old. But the price mitigates against us using this amazing stuff every day: it is the sort of thing you bring out, with great reverence, under a silver salver when the bishop comes for tea.

So child's father resorts to the internet and finds http://www.plamilfoods.co.uk. This place sells chocolate spread in recyclable packing AND, when phoned, the nice lady assures us that the packaging they use for postage is ALSO recyclable. Sorted.

But I am starting to think about this packaging business. Much of it can be avoided by buying local and making things from scratch. But what exactly are the relative merits of metal versus plastic lids? Right now we are choosing metal lids simply because they can be easily recycled in Cambridge. But maybe making them in the first place, and then re-making them into something else actually uses more energy and resources than plastic would have done? Shouldn't we take into account the whole life cycle of the packaging? Maybe if Cambridge recycled plastic lids (and, in fact, the whole range of this ubiquitous plastic packaging) a plastic lid, on balance, would be better?