How near ‘Zero Waste’ (Nearo Waste?) can we get?

A few weeks ago I went out for an uncharacteristically early morning walk. I couldn’t sleep and thought it would be nice to go for a walk just before the dawn came up. I took a bag with me and picked up a few bits of litter on the way. It was bin day and I walked past lots of houses with all their rubbish bags outside waiting to be collected. I noticed a lot of the houses in my area seemed to only be putting out one bag of rubbish and one of recycling, and one of my closest neighbours had only one recycling bag approximately a quarter full with mostly dog food cans. Then I got back to my house and saw two full bags of recycling waiting on the roadside (and none of it from litter picking) and, to be honest, it wasn’t a good feeling. That’s an awful lot for just three people. I remember when it used to be one bag, and usually not a full bag either. 

So over the course of a week I had a look at some of the stuff that went in there. It probably won’t come as any surprise to you that the vast majority of what’s there is food packaging. My first instinct was to simply say right well let’s get rid of the plastics and cardboard, try practising some zero waste techniques and reduce the footprint a bit more. But the more I look into this more I can see the problem is a complex one that just buying unwrapped stuff won’t fix. 

The first thing is that plastic is a very useful product, especially when it comes to keeping things fresh for longer. If you shop every few days, the chance of non-wrapped produce starting to go off before you use it is slim. I prefer to go to the supermarket as little as possible so any fresh produce in my fridge will start to look a bit shady by the end of the 7-10 days. On the other hand only 9% of the plastics we throw out in this country ever gets recycled so cutting down on its use is the best plan. For me to go as close to zero waste as possible, I’ll have to employ a lot of different techniques besides buying ‘naked produce’ and there will be trade offs. For example, I would love to try buying food and household items from a bulk buy store with loose containers but the nearest one to me is Lincoln. Even without the Lockdown complicating everything it is not worth my time and petrol to do a two hour round trip for only a few scant items. There’s no delivery - obviously - and even if there was that’s generating more packaging waste. 

A lot of the issues are discussed in depth both online and in books. One book I particularly liked (that my local library had as an online loan) is Bea Johnson’s book Zero Waste Home. I like the fact that she considered the pros and the cons and accepted that zero waste is not achievable but as close to waste-free is and it’s a worthwhile thing to strive for. Do whatever you can do because something is better than nothing. 

So, this week I started a ‘time and motion’ study, looking at everything I did, what products it involved and how I could improve what I was doing to move towards a zero waste approach. The biggest area is grocery and household shopping. 

During lockdown I’ve been getting shopping delivered, partly as I’ve stayed in to shield Audrey and reduce Martin’s exposure to COVID and partly for convenience. Now, in the supermarkets you can opt to put loose items into your own bags, but you don’t get that with online shopping. Yes you can specify that you don’t want carrier bags, but they will still use them for frozen food and household chemicals while loose fruit and veg will be put into a plastic bag complete with a sticker. Also, I realised I have been ordering certain products in multiples wrapped in plastic for convenience. For example, peppers or avocados I order as a two or three pack in plastic packaging. 

So I’ve been working out a better way of buying these products that has minimal packaging to try and reduce what we throw out. I started off by going back to shopping outside so I can regain more control over the process - Audrey had her first vaccination last week and I feel more comfortable going out now.

This week’s shop was only a small one and there wasn’t a massive amount I could do but I did what I could - I bought as much ‘naked’ as possible. I was pleased to see that Morrison’s had brown bags for fruit and veg but at first glance I felt that there wasn’t a large amount of produce that was loose. There was no loose broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, pears, apples or salad items apart from spring onions so I had to forget about those. However, I found bananas, sweet potatoes, courgettes, onions, avocados, Brussels sprouts, sweetheart cabbage, peppers (only red available loose), oranges and mushrooms. That’s plenty. Out of the 10 items I did buy, four were not seasonal. If I could have bought everything I wanted, three of the items would have been out of season (I would not have bought the courgettes). 

As for the rest of the shop I tried where possible to make different choices to bring me closer to being less wasteful. Instead of the Fajita meal kit I opted for a packet of fajita spice and wraps separately, which eliminated the salsa packet, which rarely gets finished, and the outside packaging. Audrey and I usually have ours with rice and the leftover wraps are frozen to use for Martin’s lunches. In time i could look for large bulk packs of tortillas and the spice mix, or make some tortillas or maybe even get rid of the tortillas and just serve it with rice.

Instead of buying a large pack of cheaper chicken breasts for 2-3 easy meals, which I’ve been doing more and more during lockdown out of boredom, I bought just two good quality free range chicken breasts for one evening meal for the three of us. And this is where it got a little complicated, because I could’ve gone to the meat counter and got two chicken breasts wrapped in a plastic bag that I brought from home for that purpose but the chicken was not free range or organic and I want to move away from cheap chicken this year towards higher welfare animals. I had to decide on the spot what was more important to me. My choice to buy free range chicken breasts meant I will have plastic packaging to recycle at the end of this week.

While this is a start, it in no way accounts for the majority of stuff in our recycling. Most of the plastic packaging on the fruit and veg goes into the black bag, and that goes to an incinerator that powers a local electrical plant. Our recycling is mostly foil cat food tins and cans, cardboard, paper and plastic dessert/yoghurt and single portion pots with the occasional glass bottle or jar. 

That’s the stuff I need to tackle.