Packaging: here I go again

[simsqu]

OK that was fun with the cars, so here’s another one to consider.


DISCLAIMER
Before everyone gets on their high horse and bangs on about how they wouldn’t do this even if they could…freedom (whatever the hell that means nowadays)…choice…Corbyn…treehuggers…right to have a womb etc, again can I state for the record that these are my personal circumstances and mainly because of being fortunate to live in London, I am able to do this.


Where I live, I am within 30 minutes walking distance (no car remember??) of at least three grocery shops that are completely plastic packaging free. In fact almost all packaging free: just a few paper bags available. All items for sale are in large containers, from which you decant, and you either put the item (rice…pasta…pulses…flour…herbs…spices…nuts…chocolate…dried fruit…make-your-own-peanut-butter-machine, cereals etc etc etc) into a paper bag, or you bring your own container.

I went into one of the shops today and was surprised to see that I managed to get almost everything on my list. The variety was fantastic, including a lot of household items such as washing-up liquid (although by the time I got my paper bag of washing-up liquid home, my aduke beans were ruined), soap powder, cleaning materials etc The variety of stuff available exceeded the choice in any big supermarket. Was it more expensive than a large supermarket? It was, but actually not by much: I was pleasantly surprised and as I said, the variety was better than most shops.

Of course, the actual materials was limited to dry goods & household items but I then went to a veg shop and got all my fruit and veg. Wet fish shop for fish.

When I unpacked, it took a bit of time decanting stuff into empty jars and containers I had accumulated, but basically, I did a pretty good 2-3 day shop with ZERO packaging, other than a few paper bags.

I thought that was pretty impressive. Again, before everyone goes off on one, I am not for a minute suggesting that I can go packaging free: there is still plenty of stuff I get from a regular supermarket with packaging, but there is no doubt, again with a bit of inconvenience and forward planning, that you can cut down vastly on packaging, especially plastic.

I realise that packaging-free shops are still pretty few and far between, and I suspect limited to large towns/cities, but it’s a start isn’t it? And I would hope that the more they are used, the more successful and affordable they might become.

Supper tonight: buckwheat porridge with yeast mash and alfalfa sprouts. BnC’s coming round (I just knocked him out).

[richlist]

Lucky you for having these shops close to you and we'll done. The big supermarkets are being very, very slow to get up to speed with the zero packaging idea. I believe I read that one of the big four is currently trialling it in a few stores but it's all painfully slow. The amount of seemingly unnecessary packaging is incredible.

20 years ago when I was living in Germany people would shop in the supermarket and after the check out would take their items out of boxes and packaging and re-bag before putting it in their car. They left the packaging in the supermarket trolley.......perhaps we should do the same.......it might help the speed of change !

[jfgw]

(although by the time I got my paper bag of washing-up liquid home, my aduke beans were ruined)

I bet you were foaming at the mouth!


Julian F. G. W.

[88V8]

....packaging-free shops are still pretty few and far between, and I suspect limited to large towns/cities...

There's one in Stroud, or used to be, well off our beaten track and when last we went it only sold pulses.

I remember when Cullens sold loose goods from tubs & bins. Pre-supermarkets I bet it was pretty common not that I took much notice 60+ years ago.
Yes, more of these shops would be a good thing, if only for a few of us who put environment before price.

Those who really couldn't care less routinely buy from Amazon, king of the overpackagers.

V8

[SimonS]

OK that was fun with the cars, so here’s another one to consider.



I realise that packaging-free shops are still pretty few and far between, and I suspect limited to large towns/cities, but it’s a start isn’t it? And I would hope that the more they are used, the more successful and affordable they might become.

.

Caterham, population 20,000 has one.

There's also a Repair club at a local church on occasional Saturdays which might, following the EU directive that companies would have to start redesigning their goods to be maintainable rather than building in obsolescence, become more popular. (oops, that's right, We don't want to participate in EU good ideas any more; they might tarnish our sovereignty. Could we repair Harry?)

[brightncheerful]

The plastic bottles containing the mineral water we buy in quantity (several cases at a time, two cases we get through weekly) are all made of recycled plastic.

Unsure how much re-use they get out of ours: contrary to the 'instructions' i have to crush them before putting them in the recycle wheelie bin or else the bin would be full of empty plastic bottles, no room for anything else.

[brightncheerful]

I have nearly completed an administrative task that really ought to have been done long ago, chuck out old work-related files of letters, copy leases and so on. I am reading the content of every file and removing anything useful which will be scanned before shredding. The unwanted stuff is also going to be shredded by a shredding company: if i were to save money and shred everything myself then my shredder would take days to get through the volume at 2-3 sheets per pass and I''d have piles of black plastic sacks filled with shredded paper to get rid of, which could means several trips to the refuse dump which could mean a series of bookings for entry passes, the social distancing at rubbish dumps, etc. So far i have processed approximately 100 files, going back to the 1980s, i've another approximately 50 to do, before tacking at least the same number and probably more that are sitting in filing cabinets. Those I've done so far have been lying untouched on open shelving, gathering dust for at least 15 years and longer.

A while back i contacted some local stables having heard that shredded paper is used as being for horses. Interested in principle provided I could guarantee no staples amongst the shredding; which I cannot do.

Re the op, the interesting point is just how few letters and leases are duplex, double-side printed. The vast majority of printed matter is on one side only of a sheet of paper. Years ago for a large company for which I was doing a lot of work I started printing duplex, only to be told off because the recipient kept forgetting to turn the page over.

The trend nowadays for junk mail is to print the recipient's name and address on the leaflet. Which means tearing the page to remove it before chucking.

[AleisterCrowley]

The plastic bottles containing the mineral water we buy in quantity (several cases at a time, two cases we get through weekly) are all made of recycled plastic.

Unsure how much re-use they get out of ours: contrary to the 'instructions' i have to crush them before putting them in the recycle wheelie bin or else the bin would be full of empty plastic bottles, no room for anything else.

I hope you take the bloody tops off, as one is supposed to. I guess you're not going to crush them (which I do) and put the top back on ? Where are these instruction regarding crushing? Our recycling only allows topless barmaids, erm... sorry, bottles and nowt else
I have seen recycling around these parts full of empty plastic bottles with the tops on, which makes them harder to recycle and they take up loads of space (mainly air)
Usually the people with two SUVs on the drive
Ideas above their station. Just cos Kate Middleton was a local lass. Harrumph

[AleisterCrowley]

OK that was fun with the cars, so here’s another one to consider.



I realise that packaging-free shops are still pretty few and far between, and I suspect limited to large towns/cities, but it’s a start isn’t it? And I would hope that the more they are used, the more successful and affordable they might become.

.

Caterham, population 20,000 has one.

My (Shropshire) home town (pop 14,000) has one

[tjh290633]

Just remember that recycling and reusing are not the same. Glass milk bottles are collected, cleaned and used again. Plastic containers cannot be reused in the same way. Lots of glass containers are single use. They get recycled by remelting in the furnace and made into new containers. Because we import so much wine in bottles, green glass is almost 100% recycled glass. Compared with making glass from raw materials, recycling saves the chemical energy (about 10-15% of the total) and saves using raw materials which have consumed energy to mine or produce. As some of the raw materials are carbonates, there is less carbon dioxide emitted.

Support your local milkman, your wine merchant and the pub.

TJH

[CliffEdge]

The plastic bottles containing the mineral water we buy in quantity (several cases at a time, two cases we get through weekly) are all made of recycled plastic.

Unsure how much re-use they get out of ours: contrary to the 'instructions' i have to crush them before putting them in the recycle wheelie bin or else the bin would be full of empty plastic bottles, no room for anything else.

I hope you take the bloody tops off, as one is supposed to. I guess you're not going to crush them (which I do) and put the top back on ? Where are these instruction regarding crushing? Our recycling only allows topless barmaids, erm... sorry, bottles and nowt else
I have seen recycling around these parts full of empty plastic bottles with the tops on, which makes them harder to recycle and they take up loads of space (mainly air)
Usually the people with two SUVs on the drive
Ideas above their station. Just cos Kate Middleton was a local lass. Harrumph

According to Which? you should leave the tops on.

[bungeejumper]

The point about supermarkets is certainly good. (Although I don't reckon my chances of being able to get strawberries or grapes home-delivered without those plastic punnets). But it does raise another issue.

Namely, that British supermarkets have the biggest market share in the whole of Europe. Which is why the convenient packaging forms that suit them best are so dominant. In France, just about every housewife shopper is happy to spend hours queueing in shops that sell stuff by the gramme with a set of scales and then put it in paper bags. They aren't quite so happy with that in Germany, but the environmental pressure is so strong that they put up with the "inconvenience" of paper-bagging everything anyway. It adds a load of time to every shopping expedition, and it tends to mean that Germans buy things in smaller quantities, more times a week. Spanish and Italians, likewise.

But in Britain? We have by far the longest working hours in Europe, particularly for women (who, let's face it, are the main food shoppers). They want a maximum of two food shops a week, and they want to get it all into the car from just one shop, and they don't have much time to browse through dozens of specialist shops. That's been a unique feature of UK retailing ever since the i980s, when I was editing retailing industry reports, and it hasn't really changed at all, although the growth of places like the Stroud market (and the wholefood stores) is a notable trend.

But Stroud, where my wife used to work, is a bit of an unusual place for the outside-the-M25 zone. You've never seen so many middle-class women with so little to do with their time. Thousands and thousands of them. They float from shop to shop in their expensive Cotswold-couture clothes while hubby is away doing Something In The City, pausing to have their coffee hand-ground or to consider which sort of aduki beans they want this week. They are, in short, enjoying a leisurely pace of life which is beyond the realms of most people's aspirations, or indeed their realities. So there are limits to how far Stroud's shoppers can be regarded as markers for what's possible out there on the housing estates.

There, I reckon I must have offended somebody? Hope so.

BJ

[moorfield]

I realise that packaging-free shops are still pretty few and far between, and I suspect limited to large towns/cities, but it’s a start isn’t it? And I would hope that the more they are used, the more successful and affordable they might become.

Sounds great, until some nutter/moron (insert your own noun of choice here) starts doing something malevolent, which will happen sooner or later. Then we are back to lawyers, and tamper evident packaging ...

[Dod101]

simsqu's post takes me back to immediately post war before the advent of supermarkets. On the one hand they ought to be cheaper, no packaging but on the other I guess it takes more shop assistants. How does he get washing up liquid to remain in a paper bag?

Is what sounds like a horrible supper a compulsory part of this 'green' deal?

My local fruit and veg shop is basically a front for a wholesale business supplying the local hotels and they of course will not accept anything but the freshest stuff so the shop is filled with either their rejects or stuff that is two or three days old. Something to be said for a supermarket where you can identify the fresh stuff by the 'best by' label.

Dod

[richlist]

My housekeeper buys items like washing up liquid in bulk (5 ltr) containers. The same goes for many other cleaning materials, toilet rolls etc and anything normally supplied to the catering trade is sourced in quantity. Ok you need somewhere to be able to store such items but it makes perfect sense to us.

[UncleEbenezer]

Just remember that recycling and reusing are not the same. Glass milk bottles are collected, cleaned and used again. Plastic containers cannot be reused in the same way.

Of course they can! For example, when I brew up a cauldron of soup, what doesn't get eaten immediately goes into the freezer in plastic containers, re-used having originally contained supermarket food. Or supermarket water bottles get re-used to carry water in the backpack. The only bit missing from "in the same way" is the inefficient part - collecting them.

Support your local milkman, your wine merchant and the pub.

TJH

[AleisterCrowley]

The plastic bottles containing the mineral water we buy in quantity (several cases at a time, two cases we get through weekly) are all made of recycled plastic.

Unsure how much re-use they get out of ours: contrary to the 'instructions' i have to crush them before putting them in the recycle wheelie bin or else the bin would be full of empty plastic bottles, no room for anything else.

I hope you take the bloody tops off, as one is supposed to. I guess you're not going to crush them (which I do) and put the top back on ? Where are these instruction regarding crushing? Our recycling only allows topless barmaids, erm... sorry, bottles and nowt else
I have seen recycling around these parts full of empty plastic bottles with the tops on, which makes them harder to recycle and they take up loads of space (mainly air)..

According to Which? you should leave the tops on.

Possibly in some areas, but it's not a universal rule so Which? are naughty if they have said it is

My area;
https://info.westberks.gov.uk/recycle
"If your recycling has not been collected for some reason, you should be left a note explaining the problem.

Reasons might include:
..
tops left on plastic bottles - please remove all tops from bottles"

[Leothebear]

I think the big supermarkets are missing a trick here. The first to make a significant effort to reduce plastic packaging will be rewarded with better sales and a boosted profile. As it is I'm sick of filling my recycling bin every time I want a fruit salad.

[Dod101]

My housekeeper buys items like washing up liquid in bulk (5 ltr) containers. The same goes for many other cleaning materials, toilet rolls etc and anything normally supplied to the catering trade is sourced in quantity. Ok you need somewhere to be able to store such items but it makes perfect sense to us.

Since I would not want to have a 5 litre container of washing up liquid on my worktop and it would not fit under the sink that means I assume decanting the liquid into fairly standard containers. There is bound to be some faff with that plus almost inevitable spillage or at least loss of some of the liquid surely?

Dod

[Dod101]

I think the big supermarkets are missing a trick here. The first to make a significant effort to reduce plastic packaging will be rewarded with better sales and a boosted profile. As it is I'm sick of filling my recycling bin every time I want a fruit salad.

We have three bins. One for landfill stuff. That is nearly all plastic of one sort or another and I only put it out once a month since there is not a large amount. Garden and food waste. This one is nearly always filled to the top for the fortnightly collection. I often take a trip to our recycling centre with more although not often enough to warrant paying another £ 50 per annum for another bin. Finally I have what the Council calls 'dry recyclates', newspapers, cans, plastic bottles (without tops), plastic trays and the like plus some cardboard. Always close to being full every couple of weeks.

So I guess I recycle about 80% of my rubbish.

Dod