In honour of Go Green Week, we've handed the climate blog over to colleagues to share what they are doing in their own lives to make a difference.
Helen Leach from our Norwich office discusses the merits of ridding her world of food packaging.
More and more of our food is purchased surrounded by plastic packaging – four apples can be nestled in three different types of plastic just to get them from the supermarket shelf to the fruit bowl. Why? And what are the consequences of this?
It is true that plastic packing can reduce food wastage by slowing down the rotting process but let’s look at the rotten process of having the plastic in the first place.
Plastics can be bad for the environment in several ways:
Beaches are really revealing when it comes to finding out what we’ve been throwing away. If you’ve ever walked along the beach after a storm it’s pretty obvious that we’ve been eating a lot of plastic encased food. While we may have really enjoyed that vacuum packed piece of Coley with chips, the plastic packaging they came in are now floating in the sea on the other side of the world and a sea turtle has eaten the ballooned bag thinking it’s a tasty jellyfish. The Earth is now believed to be suffocating in an air-tight layer of plastic waste that’s killing thousands of marine animals and seabirds, choking coral reefs and covering critical environments.
But there are alternatives to this scenario. The best thing I did to reduce the use of plastic packing in my weekly shop was to sign up to a veggie box scheme. Every Wednesday when I get home from work the anticipation brews inside as I pick up my box from the front garden to see what’s in there. Albeit not mud free, there is not a single morsel of plastic and to boot the food is local, seasonal and very tasty! A lot of fruits and vegetables don’t even need to be put in a bag – things like bananas and onions come with their own natural packaging. You could even try growing your own.
For other kitchen cupboard necessities you could set up deliveries with the local milkman so the glass bottles can be reused and keep the shelves stacked with recyclable tin cans.
Be like Gok Wan and show how food can look good just as it is, naked!
How can you reduce the packaging in your life? Do share your own tips below.