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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When single use plastic is everywhere in your office, how do you go about cutting it down? “Ugh. Forgot my bags again, that’s another 5p.” We’ve all had it happen, finally getting to the front of a busy checkout and realising our bags are at home, somewhere in that redundant drawer in the kitchen. And whilst some see this as a modern inconvenience, we forget that less than 60 years ago, plastic bags didn't even exist. The average plastic bag is used for around 20 minutes before it is discarded. More than 1.6 billion gallons of oil are used each year to manufacture them and they can persist in the environment for almost 500 years. And whilst biodegradable plastic bags sound like the perfect solution, they only degrade under certain conditions and are never really gone – they simply break down into smaller bits of plastic. In the first 6 months after the 5p levy on plastic bags was implemented, their use in the UK decreased by 85%. And whilst this is a victory for environmentalists, wildlife and, well, everyone in the long run, there are many more unnecessary single use plastic items we still use to excess that are under no scrutiny. For example, disposable coffee cups and single use plastic bottles. I have been lucky enough to have travelled quite a lot and have stayed in places where it’s advisable to avoid drinking tap water and bottled water is the safe alternative. So I find it bizarre that in the UK, where tap water is perfectly safe, the population drink 2.8 billion litres of bottled water each year. Having recently graduated from MSc in Conservation & Biodiversity at University of Exeter, where a lot of research is focused on plastics and their impact on the environment, I learnt more about the direct and indirect impact single use plastic has especially on marine life. I started with the easy options of cutting out plastic, like always asking for drinks without straws and boycotting products which are unnecessarily wrapped in plastic, but single use plastic is insidious and increasingly difficult to avoid. When I arrived at the BBC, I noticed there were disposable coffee cups on nearly every desk each morning which would be added to during the day by single use water bottles. At one point I remember seeing 4 at one co-workers desk and genuinely felt my heart sink a little. If this was just one person within an organisation of over 20,000, imagine the waste generated each day from coffee cups and bottles alone? Across the UK, it is estimated that 7 million coffee cups are used each day. The awful thing about them is that only 1 out of 400 is recycled, going through a very energy intensive process. The other 399 will end up in landfill and remain there for years. Moment on the lips, lifetime in the tips. I explained the many problems caused by single use plastic to my team as well as its prominence in our office and the fact it was actually making me sad. This gave me an idea to impose a “Naughty Jar”, where any time someone brings in a single use coffee cup or plastic bottle, 10p goes in to be donated to Surfers Against Sewage, a fantastic environmental charity working to protect our UK beaches. After only a week of this self-imposed office tax, nearly every member of the Terrific Scientific team had a reusable coffee cup and bottle. There is now so little money in the jar that I personally have to add a much greater amount when donating to the charity! But this behaviour change within the office is the real victory. It just goes to show that every little does help, and that behaviour and habit change in relation to plastic use is possible, we just need a bit of a nudge. P.S. Many coffee shops offer a small discount on hot drinks when you take in a reusable cup - yet another reason to get one for yourself!
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. It has to be said, insects do not really sound like the most appetising of foods. However, research published this year has suggested that crickets, palm weevil larvae and mealworms may all be more nutritious than beef or chicken. Today is World Edible Insect Day (yes, it has its own day!), aiming to increase the prevalence of insect based foods in western cultures by legalising them and publicising the benefits of eating insects, both to the individual and the environment The study mentioned above aimed to compare the nutritional content in 100g portions of various insects in comparison to beef, chicken and pork, using two different methods.
The first, Ofcom, produced a 1-100 score on levels of energy, salt, sugar and saturated fat, and found no significant difference between the various insects and traditionally farmed meats. The second, Nutrient Value Scores, also took vitamins and calcium content into account, and found a significant difference between the nutrient levels in all insects compared to beef and chicken, with only caterpillars and silk worms losing out to pork. From this, it looks like insects could be the next big health food trend, especially when the WHO are likely to declare on Monday that "bacon and other processed meats cause cancer". Insects are also considered a delicacy in many places and their breeding and consumable yield are extremely efficient, meaning they would cause reduced environmental impact in comparison to beef, for example. So eating them would not only be good for us, but for the planet as well. It has also been argued that there are fewer ethical problems with eating insects in comparison to farmed animals such as cows as there is reduced suffering when they are harvested for food. It is worth noting that the carcinogen story is probably scare mongering from the press as the WHO have not confirmed this yet. However, I might think twice before eating a full English again, and maybe try find a good recipe for fried crickets instead. |
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