My Plastic Free July Challenge

As a volunteer at this year’s Ocean Film Festival in Poole, I agreed to have a go at their Plastic Free July Challenge.

There were two options: Avoid the big 4 (single-use coffee cups, plastic bottles, drinking straws and single-use plastic bags) or go the whole hog and try to avoid buying anything in plastic for the whole month.

As I’ve already cut the big 4 out of my day-to-day life, I decided I’d have to go the whole way. I’m going to be totally honest - I failed. But not through a lack of trying.

There are just some products that it seems impossible to buy not wrapped in plastic - examples include toilet roll, toothpaste, toothbrushes, mushrooms and salad.

That said, just by thinking about it, and taking the time to look, there were quite a lot of products where I was able to move away from plastic - ketchup (glass bottle), oats (by purchasing them from a store that sold them in a paper bag, rather than a plastic one), butter (by opting for standard blocks wrapped in foil instead of the spreadable ones in a plastic tub), and teabags (picking the only product in a cardboard box that wasn’t also wrapped in plastic).

What I’ve realised through doing this challenge is just how ubiquitous plastic is in our society - I mean it’s even part of our geological record now. It is, quite literally, everywhere. And avoiding it as much as possible takes a really conscious effort.

There are some steps you can take that just seem like no-brainers to me, such as using canvas shopping bags instead of plastic ones, but when you can’t buy something without having plastic packaging, what do you do? Never buy another toothbrush? Pick your own mushrooms? Use newspaper instead of toilet roll?

It isn’t practical, or necessarily safe, and I don’t know what the answer is. What I do know is that we need to use less plastic and that if, for example, we all made a conscious effort to buy the products in glass bottles instead of plastic ones, the latter would eventually stop being produced.

It’s not going to be a quick fix (if there even is one at all), and much though I’d love it, I seriously doubt there will be any legislation to support plastic-free packaging, which is a shame given how well that’s worked for single-use carrier bags.

One of my biggest problems with plastic is that it doesn’t go anywhere. It may get recycled but more often than not it travels the planet in the oceans or on the wind and it pops up everywhere. I’m a huge fan of the #2minutebeachclean campaign and I do one most days when I’m walking the dog, picking up everything from water balloons and plastic bottles to polystyrene and broken beach toys.

Just one of my #2minutebeachcleans

But all that rubbish still has to go somewhere and sadly that’s landfill. Personally I think that’s better than it drifting around in the ocean and making its way into the food chain, but it’s far from a perfect solution.

If anyone else had a go at the Plastic Free July Challenge I’d love to know how you got on - or if you found any ingenious solutions to buying items that always come wrapped in plastic.