For anyone determined to avoid plastic, non-essentials like crisps are the first to go. But now thanks to Walkers, they don’t have to be!
Walkers have brought out cardboard tubes of crisps without even a plastic lid! The top is cardboard which is easy to peel off, so absolutely no plastic required.
So, when you’re feeling snackish and want something crunchy and savoury, grab yourself a tube of Walkers Stax 😀
[ DISCLAIMER: These are not a health food 😉 ]
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Other things for cleanliness
It’s not difficult to buy recycled toilet roll and kitchen roll, but getting it without plastic wrapping is impossible. Or so I thought until I opened a wonderful Christmas gift from Miranda – toilet rolls: 100% recycled paper wrapped in nothing but 100% recycled paper! (She discovered them thanks to a post by The World According To Plumes) 
“Toilet roll so soft it’ll make your bottom smile” is the slogan of who gives a crap, a wonderful organisation which donates half of its profits to help build toilets for people who don’t have them (that’s about 40% of the world’s population).
They might seem, at first glance, rather more expensive than what you can get at the supermarket but there is actually very little in it. You see the rolls are double length (we have noticed a roll lasts twice as long in our bathroom than the ones from Waitrose) and the people at who gives a crap have already done the maths for you: a box of 48 double length rolls costs £36 which is 18.8p per 100 sheets. Compare that to Waitrose who say their recycled toilet tissue costs 16.9p per 100 sheets.
See? Not much in it. And just think what you get for your money: a clear environmental conscience and a warm glow derived from the knowledge that you’re helping people build much-needed toilets.
Each roll is beautifully wrapped in decorative recycled paper which you can save and re-use as wrapping paper. It really is gorgeous 😀
So what are you waiting for? Get over to who gives a crap and satisfy all your toilet roll and kitchen roll needs. Initiate a regular order (every 8 or 12 weeks) to get £5 off, and shipping is free in the UK if you spend over £20.
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Click for PLASTIC AVOIDANCE parts two, three, four, six and seven 😀
Real Food
Once you’ve accepted that you can’t always get organic, it’s not difficult to avoid plastic. If you can’t find enough loose produce at your usual supermarket, find out if there’s a good old fashioned market in your town. We’ve found one which is just a big fruit and veg stall in the town centre, once or twice a week. The guys who run it are really friendly, they sell quality seasonal fruit and vegetables, provide small (compostable) paper bags to fill, and it’s very good value for money – much better even than the supermarkets. Just take your own shopping bags and get them to weigh as much as you need. 
We bought a big 12.5 kg sack of Desiree potatoes from them for just £5!
We also have a health food shop not too far away which sells a small selection of loose organic produce which is great although we can’t get there every week.
Or you might be able to find a local organic produce grower who operates a veg box scheme whereby you order a weekly veg box from them and they deliver it to your door. They will be happy to leave the box in a designated safe place if you’re going to be out and you’ll get a great selection of whatever is in season. The soil Association will help you find a scheme near you 🙂
As for other necessary staples – you can probably get most of them in glass jars or tins. We used to buy lentils, sultanas, pasta, tofu, cereal etc etc in plastic packets because we thought we couldn’t avoid it, but now we’re getting our lentils in tins and we’ll manage without cereal, pasta and dried fruit. We buy organic oats in paper bags and I’ll mix them with fresh fruit for my breakfast instead of sultanas.
*Since writing this I have discovered the Zero Waste Club – a wonderful mail order company in London from whom you can order organic dried fruit, nuts, grains, pasta, sugar, pulses, seeds, cocoa, popcorn, herbs and spices and more! You order it by weight and they mail it to you wrapped in paper bags. See Plastic Avoidance: Part 7.
Things like vinegar, ketchup and oil are easy to get in glass bottles, although sadly I don’t think there’s any way of avoiding the plastic pouring spout they put in the oil bottles. But I always think, even if everything is not as perfect as you’d like it to be, the world would be a better place if everyone at least did this. Same goes for things like cocoa powder and gravy granules – they come in cardboard tubs with metal bottoms and a plastic lid. Sometimes mostly plastic-free is the best you can do.
Lots of other staples that have always been wrapped in paper, still are. You can get bread in paper bags from a bakery, or you can make your own. I haven’t been able to buy salt without plastic wrapping but if you buy things with salt already added – like the stock cubes above (paper-wrapped in a cardboard box) – then you can manage without it.
Something else to be aware of is that tea bags (which are supposed to be compostable) are actually made of 20% plastic. See here for a great post with more details about that and sign this petition aimed at getting Unilever to remove all plastic from their tea bags. Be aware though, it’s not just Unilever that does it, this is common practice. The only way to be sure you’re not getting plastic is to buy loose tea leaves 🙂 And if you check this out you’ll see that there are a lot more uses for tea leaves than just a relaxing drink.
Need a meal in a hurry? Well, you can’t buy hash browns or oven chips anymore, but look what you can buy! There are all sorts of delicious and convenient ready-prepared vegan goodies in cardboard containers in the freezer section of your supermarket.
So whadaya need plastic for?
Not much!
ps I’ve just found out you can even buy plastic-free crisps 😀
Click for PLASTIC AVOIDANCE parts two, four, five, six and seven
PS:
Now you can get frozen ORGANIC veg that’s just packaged in a cardboard box – no plastic bag inside! 😀
Look for it at your local health food shop and if they don’t have it, ask them to stock it 😀
Update 23.11.21:
You can now buy Vego hazelnut chocolate bars (yum yum yum) in compostable wrappers:
And Plamil Cocoa Bites – chocolate chunks (yummy yummy) in paper bags:
Sweet Treats
Doing without plastic doesn’t have to mean doing without.
Let’s get our priorities straight and start with chocolate 😀
The chocolates pictured above tick all the right boxes:
1. They’re vegan
2. They’re fair trade (included on the ethical chocolate list)
3. They’re organic
and
4. They’re not wrapped in plastic 😀
In fact, as far as we can tell, there is only one downside to these particular chocolates – they don’t last long! 😉
Vivani is new to us and we’re so glad we found them. Their chocolate is absolutely gorgeous – I’ve eaten a lot of chocolate over the years and I think I can confidently say that this is the best ever! My favourite is the White Nougat Crisp, no, the Mandel Orange Rice Choc, no no, it’s the Crispy Corn Flakes Rice Choc …. no, I can’t choose between them, their entire vegan range is completely amazing (be aware that sadly not all their products are vegan, but a lot of them are). Check out their whole range here 🙂
The Ombars are gorgeous too – especially for those who like their chocolate rich and dark and nutritious, coz it’s raw 🙂 Everything is wonderfully vegan and look what they say about their packaging:
“Like you, we believe in recycling. So we wrap our bars in recyclable aluminium foil and paper, and ship them in fully-recyclable cardboard. Did you know our button bags are fully compostable? Just throw them in your compost bin with vegetable peelings – within a few weeks the bag will have completely broken down and returned to nature.” (see their FAQs)
We got all these treats from our local Health Food Shop, and we’ve seen Ombars in Waitrose, but if you can’t find them near you, you can buy Ombars online here and Vivani lists their worldwide stockists here 🙂 And of course you can probably find them on Amazon 😉
Ask whoever mails them to you not to use plastic wrapping 😮
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If you want more than just chocolate in your plastic-free sweet treat artillery, you can make cakes and biscuits yourself. Vegan recipes use oil instead of margarine, which can be bought organic in glass bottles; flour comes in paper bags, and sugar … well, I have in recent years felt compelled to buy sugar in plastic bags because I wanted organic fair trade. However, in prioritising plastic avoidance, I have discovered that I can buy paper-wrapped sugar that is pretty ethical 🙂 I had mistakenly believed that all white sugar had been whitened with bone-char. However, it seems that’s just cane sugar, not sugar beet. Sugar from sugar beet is vegan!
Silver Spoon proudly state their commitment to eco-friendliness on their packets:
“Sustainability is nothing new to us – we’ve been working on it for 30 years. Our sugar beet is homegrown and our bags are recyclable, made with paper from certified forests. We send nothing to landfill and our excess production energy helps to power British homes.”
They work directly with 1200 British farmers in East Anglia who grow the beets which are then transported just a short distance to the factory in Bury St Edmunds (also in East Anglia 😀 )
Not bad eh?
So far so plastic-free good.
Click for PLASTIC AVOIDANCE parts three, four, five , six and seven
We have for many years tried to keep our plastic consumption to a minimum but have found it very difficult when also trying to incorporate other ethics into our shopping habits. For example – it’s pretty easy to buy loose, unpackaged fruit and vegetables if you take your own bags to the market with you, but if you want organic produce, it’s usually wrapped in plastic.
We always recycled it of course but we know that a plastic food container, because of its low melting point, cannot be recycled into another plastic food container. It can really only be downcycled into things like plastic lumber which cannot be recycled again. Glass, paper and tin cans on the other hand, can be recycled ad infinitum. Bottles will become bottles again and again; drinks cans and baked beans tins will become cans and tins again and again; paper can be recycled again and again, and eventually composted.
So, even though we were recycling, we felt very bad about the plastic in our bins. Add to that the worry that maybe the plastic being collected by the council recycling lorry wasn’t even being recycled and … well, let me explain:
I had an email a couple of weeks ago from Avaaz campaigning group saying that studies had shown that most (about 80%) of the plastic in the ocean gyres was coming from rivers in Asia and Africa. Finding it very hard to believe that people in Asia and Africa consume more plastic than people in Europe and America, I was reminded of an email conversation I’d had with someone at Waitrose supermarket. They told me that there was no facility to recycle their plastic bags in this country so they sent them to Asia for recycling.
Well – if Waitrose does it, you can bet a lot of other companies do it too, maybe even councils? And if the UK sends plastic to Asia for recycling, you can bet other countries do too. If the same is happening in Africa that would explain why 80% of the plastic in the oceans arrives there from those continents. The plastic that I diligently put out for recycling might be ending up in the ocean!
It’s all speculation but it makes a lot of sense and the only way I can be sure that I’m not part of the problem is to take control of it myself.
We now realise that the good done for the Earth in growing organic, is compromised if they wrap the organic produce in plastic. Plastic not only litters and pollutes when it’s disposed of, the very production of it is toxic since it is (usually) made from oil.
So we’re not going to pay in to that any more.
We have to prioritise plastic avoidance and hopefully these ethical companies will respond with ethical packaging. In the meantime, we’ll show you our plastic avoidance tactics.
Starting tomorrow 😀
See all our Plastic Avoidance Tactics here
You know plastic’s not fantastic
And it might seem rather drastic
But the obvious solution
Is a New Year’s resolution
To give unfantastic plastic the heave-ho.
So that’s what we’ve decided,
We’re determined to be guided
By the needs of Earth and Earthlings
To be free of all plastic things,
So to all new things of plastic we say NO!
Check out our Plastic Avoidance Tactics 😀
It’s a plague of plastic that’s choking our rivers and suffocating the ocean — it’s even in our drinking water! But finally there’s hope.
The Environment Secretary is considering a revolutionary plan to give people a financial incentive to recycle. It’s a complete no-brainer, but industry lobbyists and even supermarkets are fighting back, hard — and there’s just four days left in the consultation.
To drown them out we need a tidal wave of public support to flood the consultation — click to add your name and then share this with everyone, we have four days to make it massive:
Secretary Gove: End the Plastic Plague Now!
The plan is super simple: a small deposit is paid with every plastic bottle, which you get back when you recycle the bottle. In places like Germany and Denmark this same plan has taken recycling rates to over 90%.
More recycling means new plastic production would plummet. We’d use less oil, our beaches, birds, and brooks could breath again, AND our councils would actually save money from lower garbage collection and landfill costs. Complete no-brainer.
There’s no time to waste — every minute another 10,000 bottles go un-recycled. With just four days left, let’s make sure the Minister can’t back down now. Add your name and then tell everyone:
https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/plastic_pollution_uk_loc/?cmzEIlb
You can read I’ve got a bamboo toothbrush in Why are you a vegan? and other wacky verse for kids or here where you’ll also find links to how to get your own bamboo toothbrush 🙂
I’ve got a bamboo toothbrush,
It’s the best one you can own.
It’s not as good as mine though,
Mine is red and yours is brown
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Yours is red because it’s plastic,
You know plastic isn’t good.
It is good coz it’s shiny.
Yours is dull, it’s made of wood.
****
Toothbrushes by the millions
Are thrown away each year,
And because they don’t rot naturally,
Lifetimes later they’re still here.
****
Well at least my plastic toothbrush
Won’t make forests get the chop.
Your wood one’s killing all the trees,
You shouldn’t kill trees, so stop!
****
No, bamboo is not like other trees,
Because it grows so fast.
They’re always planting new ones
So their supply will always last.
****
And when my toothbrush is old and useless,
When I have to throw it out,
The natural fibre it’s made from
Will safely, quickly rot.
Would you like a bamboo toothbrush?
Look here
and here
and here
and here
Or maybe they sell them at your local health food store? 🙂
Crack crunch shingle slides
Under my feet, the sand hides
Salt smells float on the breeze
It makes me smile, the scent of the seas
***
Waves crash, advance and retreat
Gulls call, for others to meet
But sharp tones, unnatural, manmade
Objects litter, spoil and invade
***
I lift and tidy, pick up the mess
Don’t allow plastic to spoil nature’s dress
Dangerous to some, others think it’s food
Getting it out of harm’s way makes me feel good
Violet's Vegan Comics 