Why I am not buying any plastic for a month, and its role in my inevitable downfall

It is clearly an impossible task.

For the past two years I’ve bought rather a lot of food, and thinking about it, I’ve grabbed nearly all of it in a mad panic in Sainsbury’s Local, Honor Oak Park, palace of dreams (open 6am - 11pm).

We have two children in the house. Who are normally lovely. But one of them is allergic to dairy, and nuts, and eggs, and everything in between. And the other of them has strongly held opinions about what items of food ought to be served to her, and has no hesitation at all in expressing these opinions.

My wife works full time, and I work full time. We’ve got other projects outside the working day that keep us nice and busy.

But oh my! Our Sainsbury’s Local offers high-quality provisions, with a long shelf life, available to buy at 10:57pm on a Monday. Every single item on their shelves is entombed in plastic.

https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/press-releases/greenpeace-calls-sainsburys-worst-class-plastics/

Now Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall and David Attenborough have pointed out that our dependence on plastic is a Very Bad Thing. It’s killing animals, it’s killing people, it lasts almost forever in the environment and it’s so difficult to recycle that we’re sending it to the other side of the world where it sits in illegal dumps.

This is all very stressful. I have no idea what to do. My worry, and I think I’m right, is that patterns of packaging have reached the point where the consumer has no choice but to throw away apocalyptic accumulations of single-use plastic.

It is definitely enormously impossible. So let’s prove it. If there’s one thing I’m really good at, it’s attempting things that are definitely enormously impossible and failing spectacularly.

Welcome to Plastic Free July!

Written by Dan Woods who lives in London.