Plastic Fantastic
15/07/2016 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
izmeinaIt’s now 2 weeks into the Plastic Free July challenge which involves avoiding all single use plastics such as water bottles, take away coffee cups, straws and the ubiquitous grey plastic shopping back so freely handed out at the checkouts here in Oz.
It just so happens that I do not have a problem with any of those except on the odd occasion of forgetting to bring a shopping bag. It’s not a proper coffee unless it’s in a cup. For me the point of a coffee is not the buzz nor the quick fix but a chance to sit in a cosy cafe, preferably in the garden with the newspapers or some magazine and watching the world go by.
Same goes for plastic water bottles. I can get the stuff delivered to the tap for $1.50 for 1,000 litres so why would I spend twice that much for 600ml of the stuff sitting on a shelf? Plastic stagnant muck.
But it is everything else that is the problem.
Even in the space of one year since the last attempt in which I failed miserably, there has been an astonishing increase in the number of things that are all plastic wrapped for extra protection. The days of the plain old fashioned lettuce or cabbage are numbered. The small shelf space devoted to them pales into insignificance compared to the space taken by the assorted bags of washed lettuce leaves, premixed Caesar salads, Greek salads and coleslaws.
I simply do not trust those bags and wonder what sort of stuff they spray on the leaves to keep them looking so fresh for so long. One can be sure that it’s more than water. Seeking out good old fashioned lettuces from proper fruit and vegetable stores rather than the supermarkets is not much use either since a whole lettuce is simply too big for a single solitary serpent. I have found a fairly satisfactory solution to this problem by using nasturtiums, garlic leaves and coriander that are growing in the Lair. There was basil too but the snails have feasted on those leaves and left rather little for the Izzie. Resorting to the garden is super cheap, the ingredients are as fresh as one can get and there’s infinitely more flavour than the cardboard offerings in the shops. And there’s next to no risk of catching salmonella.
Even bananas and tomatoes are subjected to the plastic bag treatment or even worse those awful styrofoam trays with cling wrap plastic. Bananas already come in ready made compostable packing and most supermarket tomatoes are so hard that they hardly need extra protection but putting them on fancy trays is a sneaky way of hiding the per kilo price.
Soups are now in pouches as well as tins and half the bread in the shops comes in those infernal bags with the little twist ties.
Of course it turns out that most of the junk food such as chips, nibbles, cakes, biscuits and confectionary are all in plastic packaging so they are definitely off the menu.
The one item that has presented the greatest challenge and has proved to be the cause of much backsliding and temptation is the yellow stuff. Good old cheese. Most of it is prepackaged in plastic. Of course there is also the alternative of the deli counter where they cut the slices from big rounds and put them in wax paper. Was very happy that Maasdam cheese at the Woolworths cheese counter was half price one week. Perfect opportunity to save money and avoid plastic packaging. But of course it did not quite work out that way as they put the slices in a plastic bag before wrapping it all in waxed paper.
In a way the whole experiment is really a sneaky way to get back to the good old fashioned habits of cooking and baking from scratch or at least using up the supplies already in the pantry.
The other intended side effect is to smash the bad serpent habit of food hoarding. Bad habits such as going to the supermarket when hungry or just because I happened to pass one on the way back to the Lair have become nearly a thing of the past (well for the last two weeks at least) because just about every aisle is nearly filled with completely unkosher things.
So far I have cheated on 3 of the 15 days of this challenge. Two of these it was cheese that was the temptation - delicious Mainland vintage cheddar at a 40% discount and that Maasdam stuff where the store assistant put the slices in plastic as well as waxed paper. The third was at Officeworks where there were bubble wrapped stationery sets on the clearance shelves. There was absolutely no excuse since there’s so many notebooks and pens already lurking around the Lair.
It is definitely worth considering extending the experiment for another month simply to break the old bad habits of going to the shops when not absolutely necessary.
So so glad that at least for the present time wine still comes in good old fashioned glass bottles.
But the spookiest thing of all was starting the very first day of plastic free July in the waiting room of the plastic surgery wing of the city hospital in order to get assessed for a nose job. Those witchy warts have been behaving rather badly but that is a tale for another day.
It just so happens that I do not have a problem with any of those except on the odd occasion of forgetting to bring a shopping bag. It’s not a proper coffee unless it’s in a cup. For me the point of a coffee is not the buzz nor the quick fix but a chance to sit in a cosy cafe, preferably in the garden with the newspapers or some magazine and watching the world go by.
Same goes for plastic water bottles. I can get the stuff delivered to the tap for $1.50 for 1,000 litres so why would I spend twice that much for 600ml of the stuff sitting on a shelf? Plastic stagnant muck.
But it is everything else that is the problem.
Even in the space of one year since the last attempt in which I failed miserably, there has been an astonishing increase in the number of things that are all plastic wrapped for extra protection. The days of the plain old fashioned lettuce or cabbage are numbered. The small shelf space devoted to them pales into insignificance compared to the space taken by the assorted bags of washed lettuce leaves, premixed Caesar salads, Greek salads and coleslaws.
I simply do not trust those bags and wonder what sort of stuff they spray on the leaves to keep them looking so fresh for so long. One can be sure that it’s more than water. Seeking out good old fashioned lettuces from proper fruit and vegetable stores rather than the supermarkets is not much use either since a whole lettuce is simply too big for a single solitary serpent. I have found a fairly satisfactory solution to this problem by using nasturtiums, garlic leaves and coriander that are growing in the Lair. There was basil too but the snails have feasted on those leaves and left rather little for the Izzie. Resorting to the garden is super cheap, the ingredients are as fresh as one can get and there’s infinitely more flavour than the cardboard offerings in the shops. And there’s next to no risk of catching salmonella.
Even bananas and tomatoes are subjected to the plastic bag treatment or even worse those awful styrofoam trays with cling wrap plastic. Bananas already come in ready made compostable packing and most supermarket tomatoes are so hard that they hardly need extra protection but putting them on fancy trays is a sneaky way of hiding the per kilo price.
Soups are now in pouches as well as tins and half the bread in the shops comes in those infernal bags with the little twist ties.
Of course it turns out that most of the junk food such as chips, nibbles, cakes, biscuits and confectionary are all in plastic packaging so they are definitely off the menu.
The one item that has presented the greatest challenge and has proved to be the cause of much backsliding and temptation is the yellow stuff. Good old cheese. Most of it is prepackaged in plastic. Of course there is also the alternative of the deli counter where they cut the slices from big rounds and put them in wax paper. Was very happy that Maasdam cheese at the Woolworths cheese counter was half price one week. Perfect opportunity to save money and avoid plastic packaging. But of course it did not quite work out that way as they put the slices in a plastic bag before wrapping it all in waxed paper.
In a way the whole experiment is really a sneaky way to get back to the good old fashioned habits of cooking and baking from scratch or at least using up the supplies already in the pantry.
The other intended side effect is to smash the bad serpent habit of food hoarding. Bad habits such as going to the supermarket when hungry or just because I happened to pass one on the way back to the Lair have become nearly a thing of the past (well for the last two weeks at least) because just about every aisle is nearly filled with completely unkosher things.
So far I have cheated on 3 of the 15 days of this challenge. Two of these it was cheese that was the temptation - delicious Mainland vintage cheddar at a 40% discount and that Maasdam stuff where the store assistant put the slices in plastic as well as waxed paper. The third was at Officeworks where there were bubble wrapped stationery sets on the clearance shelves. There was absolutely no excuse since there’s so many notebooks and pens already lurking around the Lair.
It is definitely worth considering extending the experiment for another month simply to break the old bad habits of going to the shops when not absolutely necessary.
So so glad that at least for the present time wine still comes in good old fashioned glass bottles.
But the spookiest thing of all was starting the very first day of plastic free July in the waiting room of the plastic surgery wing of the city hospital in order to get assessed for a nose job. Those witchy warts have been behaving rather badly but that is a tale for another day.
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no subject
Date: 2016-07-15 02:34 pm (UTC)Strangely, Japan was even worse about this. Single pieces of fruit were all individually wrapped as well as often shrink-wrapped in sets, snacks usually came single-serving wrapped in addition to the box or bag they came in. For a nation that prides itself on its recycling it was insane!
I think it's a good challenge you're doing, and I can see how it would really force you to rely mostly on homemade foods, and sticking to the fresh-food parts of the supermarket rather than the aisles and aisles of packaged goods.
no subject
Date: 2016-07-17 02:26 pm (UTC)You can imagine the cost of all that electricity. It was insane and on at least one occasion one of the not so bright (or maybe malicious) workers turned off the power switch for the shipping container filled with boxes of frozen noodles and the whole lot had to be tossed out.
As you mentioned with the fruit, each slab of noodles was individually packed in plastic and then put in bunches of five into another plastic bag.
Year by year it gets worse. Now there are single serve instant oats sachets in boxes at a price 10 times the basic rolled oats and of course there's tons of sugar, salt and other abominable ingredients added. They even have little plastic bowls where you pour the hot water on the oats a bit like those instant noodles or dehydrated soups in plastic bowls.
Even rice now comes in single serve pouches that you pop in the microwave. You could get half a kilo of the plain stuff for the same price in the very same aisle.
Nowadays having to scoop laundry powder into the washing machine is simply too much effort so you can now buy boxes filled with single use pouches of powder at 3 times the price of the plain vanilla version.
Maybe Plastic Free July (http://www.plasticfreejuly.org/) will eventually become a world wide thing. It began with a bunch of beach combers noticing how much plastic junk was washing up on the shores and how many birds and other animals were being seriously injured by getting caught in this awful stuff.