It’s been eleven days since Magnificent Revolution visited Brentford School for Girls. In the workshop we agreed to each go off and do at least one new thing to reduce our impact on the environment. Adam and I agreed to try to reduce our consumption of plastics, starting with month-long experiment of not buying any plastics at all. So far,  it has been a journey of realisations, learning, joys, victories, and, of course, failures. But, we haven’t given up and here are our experiences so far:

Just about the whole world is wrapped in plastic. How did we get to this? What did we do before the advent of this non-degradable monster? Something definitely worth exploring in deeper detail during this “no plastic fantastic” experiment. One of our big challenges (and a subsequent victory!) was dairy products. Milk in glass bottles were impossible to find. Luckily, Dairy Crest and, in particular, Dave Cousins (our local milkman) can deliver organic milk in glass bottles with their electric vehicle straight to Adam’s door. Ahhh, so so good…..coffee with milk and no plastic bottle waist. We also added some juices to our order, as Tetra pack recycling spots aren’t exactly heaving in our local area.

Cheese, oooh cheese. We haven’t managed to win over this as yet but Adam did manage to make a special trip to Neil’s Yard Dairy to get a supply for the whole week (wrapped in paper of course). We also thought that butter was out of the question for us but after some research we learned that most butter is actually wrapped in foil lined with parchment paper. Parchment paper being cellulose specially engineered to give that grease resistant effect. We were happy that there are no plastics involved but butter packaging is still a nightmare to recycle as it’s mixture of paper and foil.

So how about all the rest of the stuff like coffee, lentils, couscous and pasta? Well, for that we found Unpackaged in Islington. A lovely shop to which you have to bring your own containers and get them filled with all the goodies you could possibly want! The fight continues…