BBC NEWS UK Magazine A month without plastic

A month without plastic

By Christine Jeavans  BBC News I am giving up plastic for the whole of August. By this I mean not buying or accepting anything which contains plastic or is packaged in plastic. So, no take-away coffees, bottles of water or pre-packed sandwiches. I'll be forsaking punnets of strawberries and packs of chicken, supermarket milk and bottled cleaning products, and switching to reusable nappies for my toddler. No longer will my other half and I be able to slump in front of the telly of an evening with the latest DVD, a takeaway curry and a bottle of wine (the cork could be plastic). It's no to any fruit packaged like this I am, if you like, donning a polyester-free hairshirt - with the aim of seeing how possible it is to live without new plastic. I will, however, be keeping the plastic I already own. But even so, it's going to be very difficult. Durable, versatile, lightweight, hygienic, cheap and strong: synthetic plastic is arguably one of the most useful inventions of the last century. It is essential in medical equipment, technology and thousands of devices which have increased our standard of living. But those very same attributes of durability and cheapness make plastic one of the most pervasive forms of waste on the planet. Plastic soup Evidence of our failure to deal with plastic rubbish is everywhere, from bulging landfill sites and countryside litter in the UK to a toxic plastic "soup" swilling around the middle of the North Pacific, thousands of miles from continental land. KEEP UP WITH THE CHALLENGE Christine's challenge is to live a month without buying or accepting plastic She will be keeping a blog to note the highs and lows See link below for her first posts Etiquette of non-plastic tea run The month starts here Island groups such as Hawaii and Midway which, by their location in the Pacific should be pristine, instead are awash with plastic, killing seabirds, turtles and other marine life. The UN Environment Programme estimates that there are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean on Earth. Some marine scientists believe that microscopic plastic fragments in the ocean can soak up pollutants which may then get passed up the food chain into fish and, ultimately, humans. Plastic audit I'm as guilty as anyone of treating this useful resource as utterly disposable. I do try to remember to take reusable bags to the shops and I drop my bottles into the recycling bag which the council collects every week. But I, like almost everyone else in the UK, junk the vast majority of plastic which comes into my home. I've kept a month's worth of my plastic waste, to use as a barometer for my month of abstinence. It isn't pretty - 603 items, including: 36 carrier bags 67 food packaging bags and films such as bread bags, cheese wrappers (and a jumbo pack of Maltesers!) 23 polystyrene tea cups with lids and 24 coffee cup lids 15 fruit punnets and vegetable trays 13 yoghurt pots 16 water bottles, 10 milk bottles, 7 juice bottles Two toothbrushes Probably the least pretty aspect to my household's waste at the moment comes in the form of disposable nappies. Our 18-month-old son gets through four or so a day so that's about 120 a month, plus individual nappy sacks, nappy bin bags and wipes, which go straight into landfill. Inevitably, however, packaging forms the greatest part of my plastic haul.