Week 7 - Plastic Basics Packets

By basics I mean the sort of food I buy week in week out and which I could not conceivably live without ie sugar, pasta, rice, couscous, porridge oats, noodles, pulses etc. With a bit of effort I can avoid buying biscuits and cakes and ready made meals and I can ask shopkeepers to pack meat and olives etc into my own containers, but I can hardly do the same with any of the staples mentioned above. The annoying thing is that I cannot for the life of me work out why any of them cannot be packed in paper bags or cardboard boxes. Flour and some sugars and Quaker porridge oats are readily available in paper bags and Lidl sells rice in cardboard boxes. So why isn't it standard practice with the rest? I can feel an email to a supermarket formulating in my head. Watch this space!

PS Now that our local deli has installed self service hoppers I can buy some of my staples loose, but this facility is not available to the vast majority of shoppers.

Weekly Weigh-In = 495g (including a plastic light switch and bulb weighing 150g, and 6 free Yakult bottles from the milkman at 60g). If these are discounted the total is reduced to 285g, which is still well over my target of 100g. All I can say in my defence is that we did seem to finish a number of the packets mentioned above this week!

Week 5 - Plastic Wrapped Bakery Products

During the week we breakfast on toast or cereal, with the occasional boiled egg. At the weekends we like to treat ourselves to something more exciting - invariably croissants. The trouble with the croissants from our local Tesco Metro is that they are encased in plastic. They sit in a preformed plastic tray which is then placed in a plastic bag, neither of which is recyclable in our area and are destined for the landfill. However, one of our local bakeries sells loose croissants and the deli sells almond ones which are wickedly delicious. Unfortunately both of them are further away, but the extra distance might help to work off some of those calories!

When I'm feeling energetic I make pancakes which the girls devour with crispy bacon and maple syrup. I remember attempting croissants once, but also remember them failing to live up to my expectations.

I've been trying to cut down on shop bought bakery items and bake my own, which are not only less wasteful but also better for us. The girls take a biscuit or a cake to school with them in their bento lunchboxes every morning and always need a snack when they come home in the afternoon. I try to go for recipes containing oats or fruit, with a bit of chocolate thrown in. Flapjacks are a perennial favourite and this week I made tiffin which is ridiculously easy and doesn't even require cooking, if you don't count heating a few ingredients in a pan.

If anyone has any good recipes to share I'd love to hear from you.

Perhaps someone could also let me know what the rules are regarding the posting of recipes. Is it alright to do so if you acknowledge the source?

Weekly Weigh-In = 165g

I'm very pleased with this and hope I can keep it up.

Day 2

The best way to avoid producing landfill waste is to avoid buying it.

Today I didn't have time to visit my local shops and had to settle for my local Tesco Express. Supermarkets are Aladdin's caves full of the most tempting treats. I love the variety of the ingredients they sell and the delicious meals you can concoct with them. But there isn't half a lot of plastic, most of it non recyclable.

Tonight's dinner was spaghetti bolognaise. The spaghetti and the mince both came in plastic wrappings. The celery and red pepper came from the fridge but they had both arrived there in plastic bags and the garlic was wrapped in a nylon(?) net. Only the onions and mushrooms escaped. They were part of last Friday's Riverford organic fruit and veg delivery. The tin from the tomatoes will be recycled via our black box, but once the tomato puree tube is finished it will end up in the bin.

On the brighter side, I did whizz up some houmous in the blender, which saved me from picking up my usual ready made equivalent in a plastic tub complete with annoying plastic seal and cardboard sheath. It'll do my elder daughter nicely for her packed lunch tomorrow.

Today's bin reveals the following:

• plastic wrapper from Sainsbury's Ardennes pate (no recycling guidelines),
• plastic wrappers from Sainsbury's all purpose cloths and Woolworth's stockinette dish cloths,
• plastic tub and lid from Tesco's fresh double cream,
• plastic lid from Sainsbury's spice jar.

I have made pate in the past and could dig out an old recipe. An easier option would be to buy it from the deli counter in Sainsbury's and see if they would let me take it away in my own container. However this sounds scarier than the butcher.

During Mrs Green's Pledge and Win Week I pledged to substitute reusable cloths for the disposable all purpose cloths I usually use. I'm not sure what the disposable cloths are made of. The plastic wrapper features a type 5 PP logo but I'm not sure whether it refers to the cloths or the wrapper. Neither am I sure what the Woolworth's reusable cloths are made of, but they look as if they may be cotton. However, they too came in a plastic wrapper. I've been getting on with them alright, but they soon look grubby and my daughters complain that they remind them of school dinners where the dinner ladies used them to wipe down the tables.

I am unable to recycle the cream tub at present as it is of type 5 plastic, but I am reliably informed that I will soon be able to do so, which means that I will not have to do without this occasional luxury.

I have a query on lids. While containers often, though not always, feature recycling logos, their lids rarely do. Can I assume they are of the same type of plastic and recycle them together, or do I have to play safe and consign them to the bin?

This is the fate of the spice jar lid. It has no logo, so that while the glass bottle goes to the bottle bank, the lid goes to the landfill. Hey ho! Next time I'll buy a refill pack in a cardboard box and transfer it to one of my collection of glass spice jars.