Smothered in a sea of plastic

Another major lesson I am learning concerns the ubiquitous plastic wrapping. There is a lot of talk these days about plastic carrier bags. There is even a town somewhere in which all traders have agreed to stop providing carrier bags for their customers. But carrier bags aren't even half the story when it comes to plastic waste.
This is the collection of plastic bags we have accumulated over the last few months. It is dominated by bags for sliced bread, wrappings for toilet tissue, and bags for vegetarian sausages, frozen peas and seafood. Apart from those irritating plastic bags that have replaced envelopes for catalogues and magazines, it is a typical haul of stuff which is wrapped around supermarket food. Before we started the challenge we used to put all this into the carrier bag recycling box outside Tesco.

But at the beginning of June we thought we ought to check with Tesco first. We emailed them, using the address given for queries on their website. The answer is that Tesco only want Tesco carrier bags in their bag recycling facility. No bread bags. No Sainsbury's bags. Absurd images spring to mind of someone somewhere sorting through the bags, sending off non-Tesco bags to landfill, while recycling the kosher Tesco ones. Can these people be serious?

So then I emailed Waitrose. They were delighted to tell us that carrier bags from any retailer were welcome in their recycling facility, but no other types of plastic wrapping were to be put there. I emailed for further clarification, but their waste expert is currently on holiday. I await developments.

By this time I was getting a trifle cross. Supermarkets use masses and masses of plastic to wrap their food. It is everywhere. They even use it to wrap up things which are already well packed, such as boxes of beer bottles. But they are apparently unwilling to recycle it. They don't even print on the bags what they are made of, to enable someone else to recycle it. Essentially they are relying on us, that's you and me, to pay to solve the problem. We are paying landfill tax so that they can have the convenience of using plastic. And let's not even go down the road of what happens when they do actually recycle it and it ends up in a village in rural China, polluting their environment.

So what are we doing now? While we wait for Waitrose's complete reply, we are avoiding buying anything which is wrapped in plastic. No more sliced bread (but that's a bonus!). Boxed frozen vegetarian sausages and burgers. We are even going to go to the market with a tupperware box to see if the coffee retailer will let us avoid plastic bags for ground coffee. And I have found somewhere which sells toilet paper wrapped in paper (and when I spoke to him on the phone, he had actually heard of the Challenge!).

And another lesson learnt: Not only do you get a nice chat and personal attention in small shops, but independent retailers are happy to help us with the Challenge - they can make their own decisions and are not bound by company guidelines. Zero Waste means Community.