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Our Plastic (not-so) Fantastic Week

Updated: Aug 4, 2020

In preparation for Plastic Free July, Noelle tried to work out how much plastic her family uses.


'In May this year we took part in the Everyday Plastic Survey to get an idea of how much plastic we use in an average week, where it comes from and, most importantly, what we can do to reduce it!

Firstly, we had to collect every piece of plastic waste we used at home for an entire week. We were told not to make any changes to our normal buying behaviour in order to get a true picture of our plastic consumption.


Here's Day 1: It did not bode well....



And here's Day 4 (please don’t judge!):


Day 5: In our defence we are a family of four (with two adult sons) in lockdown!


Day 7: by the end of the week we had collected two bags of plastic waste:


A few days later we participated in a Zoom call with Dan from Everyday Plastics and more than 50 other households. We tipped all our plastic onto the floor:


And then we separated our plastic into food packaging, cleaning/bathroom packaging and other. Food packaging definitely won:


I listed each piece of plastic on a survey form and sent it off to Dan at Everyday Plastics who then produced a report showing our family plastic footprint:



What we learned: we used 100 pieces of plastic, 98% of it was single use and if we continued like this we would throw away 5215 pieces of plastic a year.

What we are planning to change: we're going to only buy fruit and veg which is not wrapped in plastic, make our own snacks and treats so we’re not grabbing plastic-wrapped goodies from the shops, and use our local butcher's and greengrocer's as much as possible.

It’s definitely going to be a challenge, but we are planning to go completely Plastic Free in July as part of the #PlasticFreeJuly campaign:.'

Noelle Gibbs, 15th June 2020

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