What are the barriers to a Plastic-Free Food shop? Originally written for the Surfers Against Sewage Blog found here, I talk about the cost differences I have found between packaged and loose groceries in our supermarkets, and just how hard it is to complete a Plastic Free Food Shop. I'm reposting it here as the issue still stands - why are supermarkets charging more for loose food compared to options wrapped in plastic? The silent barrier to cutting down plasticIt seems the world is beginning to wake up to the impact of plastic. Viral videos of animals tangled in debris and recent heartbreaking footage from Blue Planet II have awakened a desire in the general public to do something about the deteriorating state of our oceans. And whilst it is great that people are becoming aware of the problems related to plastic pollution, the reality is that many people will struggle to cut it out of their lives. It’s not for a lack of empathy or education, or even will… Many of the most aware people will still struggle to live without it, and I ashamedly include myself in this. For all intents and purposes, I should be living a plastic-free existence – I’m a biologist. I’ve studied conservation. I’m well informed on the problems, reading up on plastic pollution and the latest scientific papers almost on a daily basis. Yet I still find myself buying products wrapped in single use plastic… I’ve got the basics of cutting down to a T – I carry a KeepCup, use shampoo bars instead of bottles, ask for strawless drinks if I’m out and bring a homemade lunch to the office most days. I use paper stemmed cotton buds and a cotton shopper, and I always use a refillable water bottle – but I can’t say I’ve gotten rid of this pervasive material altogether. I’ve successfully done Plastic-Free months the past two years, and it upsets me and makes me feel incredibly guilty that I can’t seem to sustain it for much longer. The reasons why are even more frustrating: both times, I went way over budget and spent a lot more time searching to find alternatives. It is incredibly disheartening that my personal barriers to living plastic-free seem to be time and money. The challenges of a Plastic-Free Food ShopI’m working hard to pay off student loans, cover my rent and living costs, and I’m trying to keep expenses down. This means I need to keep a close eye on what I spend at the supermarket and choose the cheapest possible options whilst still trying to maintain a healthy diet. I don’t have a car, which instantly limits the shops available to me, and living in a city means that my food shop nearly always comes from a supermarket where, you guessed it, everything is wrapped in plastic.
And here is where the problem lies. My situation is by no means unique, and more often than not, the plastic wrapped options at supermarkets are cheaper than loose options. Let’s look at three staples of my weekly shop… Loose satsumas at Sainsbury’s would cost me £2.90/kg whilst a plastic-wrapped pack would set me back £1.67/kg (Prices correct at time of writing and discrepancies like these are common at most supermarkets, not just the one mentioned). I could buy a paper wrapped loaf of bread from a bakery for £3 or spend £1 on the equivalent, wrapped in plastic. And a single loose bell pepper could cost me 50p, or I could pay £1 for a plastic wrapped pack of three. Those differences might not seem like much, but if you consider everything you would buy in the average weekly shop, it starts adding up quickly. For me at least, it soon becomes unaffordable and unsustainable. What’s worse is that a lot of the packaging, especially for fresh fruit and veg, is non-recyclable. Plus there are other things to consider, such as the monumental amount of food waste in the UK. Could I justify buying discounted fruit or veg wrapped in plastic if it means that it is saved from going to landfill whilst still perfectly edible? With the majority of the UK population living in cities and undoubtedly doing their food shop at a supermarket, it seems apparent to me that the solution to many of our plastic woes may lie with them. Even with the best of intentions, many people may find themselves bound by tight financial pressures and plastic wrapped options simply make sense from this perspective, taking immediate priority. If we are to truly change our ways as a society, we need to have viable, cheaper alternatives available, and in my opinion, this has to start with the main suppliers. It seems absolutely bonkers to me that you can save money by buying items with an extra material included in the price – surely they should cost more than loose items? On top of this, in a league of their own is the #PointlessPlastics found in many of the big chains – one quick search on twitter brings up plastic-wrapped orange segments or individually packaged muffins… the plastic is completely redundant and these need to be the first to go. Whilst plastic free grocery shops do exist, they are still few and far between and from personal experience, come at a bit of a premium. The onus, therefore, in my opinion, should be on the supermarkets to make plastic-free options more widely available. This is why I welcome the plans for a bottle deposit scheme, which the Co-Op and Iceland have recently backed publicly. It’s not the solution by any means, but it’s a start. The next step in the fight against single use plastic is for supermarkets to lead the way, and I’d implore all of the UK’s leading grocers to consider ways of making plastic free alternatives a financially sensible option for their loyal shoppers. As with the charge for plastic bags, maybe targeting people’s wallets is the incentive people need to make a more permanent change.
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If someone had told me years ago I would be designing experiments for children at one of the most respected organisations in the world, AND being paid for it, I would have laughed. I love my job, i feel like a kid in a candy shop most days and cannot believe my job is producing science content for children. It combines loads of things I am interested in, including science communication and education, and most importantly, it's opening the world of science to people who may have never considered it previously. I love the emails and tweets and letters we've had, thanking us for scientific content. But something is missing.
Even though I love my job and thank my lucky stars I'm here, I can't help but feel like a fish out of water. Working and living in Salford Quays, I am surrounded by water, but all I can see are the artificial lights of our building glimmer in the murky water. The industrial locks are all I have at the moment linking me to the ocean. There's very little wildlife, only the odd fleeting sight of a gull or a goose in the quays, especially at this time of year. I miss the outdoors, the wilderness. Glass and concrete structures are no place for me. The people I work with have had very different experiences to my own, and love the straight lines of the buildings and the squeakier than clean world that has been built around them. I miss nature, working in the field, getting stuck in the mud (or in the sand)... but these are things I feel no one around me can relate to. And, as lame as it sounds, I even miss collecting data. Adding numbers to a spreadsheet, as boring as it sounds, is incredibly rewarding, especially when you know that each count is filled with information of biological relevance. I've been formally studying Biology for 5 years now... 5 years of learning about the natural world, the perils it faces and the work going on to protect it. I've only been in my job for 6 months, but I already feel like the natural aspect is lacking immensely. I read somewhere that most children in the UK spend less than half an hour outdoors each week, and frankly it breaks my heart. As a child, and an adult, I was outdoors as much as I could be. I've never been one for the cold, but even in the depths of winter I would try to at least walk around a local park or go to the beach. Since moving North, this has massively depleted, mainly as the area I live in has very few green spaces and not a beach in sight. Another problem is that barely anyone I know would want to be outdoors for longer than absolutely necessary. So instead, I've tried to bring nature to them. I've shared article after article, news story after news story, pestering colleagues with popular science and new research, making them realise our connection to nature is a lot stronger than it might seem. But I still feel like a fish out of water. How do you get people so detached from the natural world to engage with it more? It's something I have been trying to work on as my own little side project. I have, once again, massively neglected this blog, but in the coming posts, I will be talking about the subtle ways in which biology can be snuck into the office, without anyone realising! First up: plastics. Stay tuned! Our planet has a human population of over 7 billion people. This is mirrored by a growth in demand for food and other consumables, and has unfortunately caused a rise in the amount of waste generated worldwide. We aren’t brilliant at dealing with this waste, as Professor Margaret Bates explained in her talk on Waste Management in Uganda at the Greenbank Hotel last Monday, hosted by the Falmouth Rotary Club.
When we throw rubbish away in the UK, our bins are collected and the waste disappears from sight and mind. We have no idea where it is going, what happens to it or what impact it might be having to our environment, nor do those thoughts even cross our minds. So what happens in countries where it doesn’t ‘disappear’? Professor Bates from the University of Northampton conducted a study into waste management in 4 towns in Uganda, looking at human health, pollution and waste segregation. During her visits to Uganda, she found there was minimal segregation of waste, meaning that medical, plastic, household, electrical and organic waste was generally disposed of together. In an attempt to clear waste, many rubbish dumps would light fires, releasing toxins from burning plastics which have been found to affect fertility, have a heritable impact, and are the major ingredients in agent orange. This was occurring in areas with around 74,000 residents where children were free to play and animal grazing took place, and even had banana plantations were next door. Professor Bates described these polluted areas as “more toxic to human health than Chernobyl” and found there was an increased incidence of cancer in people living near waste points due to the carcinogens produced in burning. Waste found in these areas included medical waste such as used needles, which, instead of being incinerated, were mixed with solid waste; worrying in a country where HIV/AIDS is endemic. However, any spread of disease that may have been caused by this was simply attributed to ‘evil spirits’ by local people, rather than poor waste management. Sadly, she found that there was knowledge about why segregating waste was important, but in many cases it simply was not viable due to a lack of money and resources. For example, an incinerator was available in one town but was not greatly used, as it was too expensive to run. In some cases, it was also found that the skips used to transport waste on any given day might be used to transport food the next day. Even when there were good intentions, this was often detrimental. For example, in the creation of compost, 60% organic material and 40% plastics and other materials were used, rather than organics alone. This was then applied as fertilizer. So instead of being beneficial, it may have been polluting their land further, with these plastic build-ups leaching chemicals into the soil. Unfortunately, many local people were so desensitised to seeing rubbish in their streets and around their towns that they saw no incentive in clearing it. But by getting town councils to share best practice and teaching them techniques to improve their waste management, Professor Bates is hoping an improvement may be seen in Uganda. Only time will tell... I would like to thank Professor Bates for her brilliant talk, as well as Falmouth Rotary Club for hosting the talk. I have to admit, when I first realised I had a trip to Kew Gardens for my Terrestrial Biodiversity and Conservation module, I was only mildly interested. But over 3 days this week, my preconceptions of Kew and what they did was completely overturned, and I have left this field trip with incredible respect and admiration of the work they are doing to protect plant species across the world. The field trip took us behind the scenes at Kew Botanical Gardens to meet the scientists and learn about the different projects Kew supports globally. We also had the chance to walk around the herbarium (brimming with pressed and dried specimens, some of which were hundreds of years old) and the plant nursery (where curators care for around 33,000 species of plants, growing them for scientific study and for display in the botanical gardens). We visited one of three nurseries, which had plants on the floor, the walls and the ceilings, ranging from huge palms and cycads to tiny water lillies, carnivorous plants and orchids as far as the eye could see (these are apparently a flight risk in the main public Botanical Gardens - some collectors can't get enough). I can honestly say I have never been so excited about plants. Yes, PLANTS. Let me tell you something, there is so much more than meets the eye to those green things we see in our back gardens and countryside. They are INCREDIBLE. Some of the adaptations we learnt about are absolutely spectacular, and just by looking at the photos below, you may get a sense of how biodiverse and beautiful they are and why plants are worth protecting. (Apologies for the lack of species names - alas, I am not a botanist! If anyone reading this is, please comment the names below!) This trip was designed to teach us about the ins and outs of Conservation work, but the main thing which has stuck in my mind is that of the 40(ish) MSc Conservation & Biodiversity students on the trip, I don't think any of us had any clue that a whopping 1/5 of all plant species are threatened with extinction around the world. ONE FIFTH. This ignorance to the peril plants are facing mainly stems from the fact that plant protection isn't really talked about in comparison to Animals. I am guilty of this myself. I usually rant about how charismatic megafauna always gets the attention when we should really be focusing Conservation efforts on those species which are lesser known, but it hadn't crossed my mind that plants have it worse. How naive I and many others are, for of course, no animal can survive without plants first. We heard from experts about the problems this causes with their Conservation efforts. In particular, about a partnership with the Natural History Museum, where Kew conducted a Global Assessment of the state of the world's plants; Plants Under Pressure. It was here that the figure of 1/5 appeared, as well as the concern that over 33% of the estimated 380,000 plant species 'are so poorly understood that we still don't know if they are endangered or not'. No prizes for guessing why plants are dying out: Of course, it's us. Humans. All the effects of Agriculture, Harvesting, Logging, Disturbance, Pollution, Mining and Invasive species (to name a few) are catching up with us and account for 81% of the threats to plant species. Whilst this is incredibly disturbing, our lectures this week taught us about the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, where the main aim is to halt the current and continuing loss of plant diversity globally. So what are Kew doing to combat this? Many things, actually. Here are a few initiatives we learnt about:
Of course, this is no where near the full extent of their work, but it was incredibly inspiring to hear that many of their projects have been successful. There is still a very long way to go to meet targets set for 2020, and this is a little disheartening, but after meeting these experts (who seemed to know everything about every plant ever) I have every faith that Kew will continue to achieve the goals they set themselves in the future. Here's some more photos of the field trip, and please do visit Kew Gardens to support their amazing work. The start of October is a bit of a bleak time; not much is going on. Summer has come and gone, the next proper holiday to look forward to is Christmas and Halloween is far less appealing than when you were a kid. But there is a special day, today in fact, which you might not know much about: World Animal Day! The mission: "To raise the status of animals in order to improve welfare standards across the globe". Anyone who knows me will know how much I love animals, and today is very special as it is a celebration of all animals, whether our pets or our favourite animals, those we see at the zoo or those which are so endangered we may never see them at all. The idea of today is to raise awareness and education about the state of all animals, especially those which are threatened with extinction or mistreated and hopefully raise the profile of charities and organisations trying to better the lives of these creatures around the world. Today is also a celebration of groups involved in Conservation, stopping the illegal wildlife trade, protection of natural habitats, animal care and children's education as they are really championing the causes relating to animal care. Many celebrities are also voicing their love of animals and the need to look after them by supporting groups involved in World Animal Day, especially through their social media campaigns. Other forms of support come through fundraising and global events. In 2003, 44 events were held in 13 countries, and this has now grown to around 1000 events in 100 countries, ranging from conferences to spay & neuter marathons. A list of events can be found here if you would like to get involved or have a look at the organisations working with animals in your area. Simply using the hashtag #WorldAnimalDay will help get the word out about today and will help many charities and grass roots groups raise their profile online by receiving support and attention they need to campaign for their causes. Even if it is just to see beautiful photos of animals, please visit the website, or use the hashtag to spread the word about October 4th. As many of the posts so far on Twitter have been of people's favourite animals, I think I will finish off here with my own, the green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas), and some information about it. Happy World Animal Day everyone! Photo: Green Sea Turtle via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Green_turtle_swimming_in_Kona_May_2010.jpg
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