With winter firmly behind us and Mother Nature celebrating images of pretty pink blossom and frolicking lambs, spring is most certainly in the air with its warmer temperatures, lighter nights and romantic walks. So what better time is there to introduce the subject of nudity?
Bareness, nakedness or ‘au naturelle’… whatever you call it, it all comes down to one thing, and the most exciting bit is that I’d love you to join in!
But before you get all in a lather about your middle-aged spread or whether you’ll be asked to swap car keys, please don’t, because it’s not your clothing I’d like you to abandon in this frenzied moment of springtime passion, it’s actually your packaging. Yep, packaging. All in the name of slimmer bins.
Ditch those layers
I’m sorry if you were looking to throw caution to the wind in your undies. I can’t help you there but when it comes to ditching your extraneous layers of plastic or cardboard, I’m more your kind of girl.
“There’s far too much” I often hear people cry, when given a moment to complain about over-packaging. “It’s so terrible to see it filling our bins and ending up in landfill.”
“But I’m too embarrassed to strip at the checkout” they add, pondering the option of leaving it all behind at the supermarket. And who can blame them!
It takes a strong activist to engage in such a demonstration and the quiet ones amongst us worry that holding up a queue of weary shoppers while we slowly take off our unwanted layers of plastic would most likely lead to a standing ovation of ‘tuts-and-sighs’ rather than the round of applause that we’d deserve.
Make a stand, go naked!
But if you’re constantly frustrated by the amount of packaging you bring home you can still make a stand without having to strip in public. The only compromise is that whenever you shop, you just have to remember to try and go naked.
You heard right. When it comes to shopping, think naked from the very outset and you’ll soon nip the problem of packaging in the bud. And it can also be fun, revealing a whole array of alternative but accessible options, which might just save money too.
- Getting Fruity
Avoid expensive punnets and pre-wrapped produce and buy your fruit and veg loose. Markets are great for this and staff will happily fill your shopping basket or trolley with unpackaged items. If you need to use a bag for smaller produce, forget the flimsy plastic weigh bags and try the reusable ones from Onya instead.
- Contain yourself
Consider taking your own containers to the deli counter, fishmongers or butchers and ask them to use your own containers instead of their usual packaging. You’ll be surprised at the results. If you live in London, pop along to Unpackaged where you’ll be able to shop till you drop.
- Take time to refuel
Keep an eye out for refillable alternatives to your regular products. From household detergents by companies such as Ecover to printer ink by Cartridge World and even cosmetics from organic skincare retailers like Naturisimo, more choices are gradually appearing on the market, allowing consumers to reduce their burden of packaging even further.
- Naked beauty
If you’ve got bottles cluttering up your bathroom, try venturing through the doors of cosmetic company Lush, where you will find unpackaged beauty products including shampoo and conditioner bars, massage bars, bath bombs and soaps. It’s a welcome relief for those over-burdened bathroom bins for sure.
- Give it some balls
Reduce your household bills by waving goodbye to regular laundry products and saying hello to washing balls, which can be reused up to 1000 times before refilling. And while you’re at it, consider other products that can be reused time and time again, such as E-cloths instead of kitchen towel. They’re great for cleaning worktops as well as windows and all without chemicals or glass cleaner.
Whether it’s avoiding packaging or absorbing many of the other tips offered by a growing community concerned with reducing consumer waste, one thing’s for sure, prevention is most definitely better than cure.
More and more people are realising that by introducing small, gradual changes into their lives they are able to shrink the amount of unrecyclable rubbish that is brought into their homes.
By shopping with waste in mind, there’s less dependency on landfill, incineration and even recycling and it all helps to reduce the carbon footprint associated with unwanted rubbish.
A quiet type of activism
However, be warned. This might be a quiet type of activism, where you whisper with your wallet instead shouting with your placard, but to do so you still have to dress accordingly and with all your sartorial layers intact.
Going naked with a trolley full of loose produce is one thing but streaking through the store with nothing but a bag of greens to hide your modesty is a different matter altogether and is not an action I’d ever recommend.
And as for stripping – if that’s really your thing, at least make sure you are prepared for a quick getaway and have somewhere to store all your clothes. An emergency reusable bag should do it. That is, of course, if you’ve remembered to take one with you.
However, something tells me that once you start shopping naked you’ll never forget your reusable bags again.
Written by Karen Cannard of The Rubbish Diet
Karen is author of The Rubbish Diet, which promotes zero waste and was recently shortlisted as joint runner-up in the MediaGuardian Awards for Innovation.
Karen is also a co-founder of a brand new collaborative website at The Zero Waste Checkout, which invites bloggers and readers to share news about products that are designing out consumer waste. If you are interested in reducing the amount of waste your household creates, please get in touch. You can also follow Karen on Twitter @therubbishdiet.
Please note: Neither Green Pepper nor the author are affiliated with the companies, websites or products mentioned in this article.
9 comments… read them below or add yours now
I chair the East Midlands Packaging Society. All the above is fine, but there is an alternative view, especially when food packaging is concerned. While I wouldn’t pretend for a moment that packaging has nothing to do with presentation and marketing, it’s also about preservation. We have 60 million people in the UK, and if we assume that on average they eat three times a day, that’s 180 million meals a day. We have to manufacture and distribute food on an industrial scale to feed our people. Now, being the lovely, engaged, middle class people that we are, we can trot along to our local market and buy loose produce that we take home in reused bags (and never mind Onya, by the way, use a plastic bag that a clothes shop has provided, I have some that are three years old and still going strong), but we have to accept two things – one, that the total waste, and GHG emissions, is probably higher because the food hasn’t been so well protected in transit and we may have made a second car journey to go to the market, and all the different producers have had to come to the market rather than collecting produce together in a distribution centre; and two, our choice to go to a market is predicated on almost everyone else going to the supermarket, because otherwise the market wouldn’t cope with the number of people. The greenest way to shop is undoubtedly to use an on-line retailer like Tesco or Waitrose and let a van make a lot of deliveries, not to make a lot of journeys to different ‘green’ retailers. Over 30% of the Co2 emissions of your weekly shop is driving to the store, storing and cooking. The packaging accounts for far less.
I’m glad you have declared your interest in this matter, Martin. I think there are some items that benefit from packaging, but as a rule most of what we buy from the supermarket is over-packaged, which is one of the reasons we send so much to landfill in this country. As plastic is made from petroleum and as petroleum is generally used to fuel the factories that manufacture the packaging, it is contributing to carbon emissions and other pollution and also it could be seen as a waste of natural resources.
Perhaps more could be made of recycled plastic, and even better of compostable packaging, although this would still need to undergo a manufacturing process.
I try to avoid unnecessary packaging myself, but I’m not sure about punnets of fruit, Karen. Individual peaches work out a lot dearer than they do when bought by the punnet and that’s something we all look forward to in summer that we can’t grow in the back garden. Perhaps someone will supply them in compostable cardboard containers.
Great article Karen. The idea that food should be plastic packaged is an invention of supermarkets. I am forever told that without this waste packaging food will spoil. My experience however shows this to be innaccurate. Plastic packaging is avoided under the Zero Waste challenge. In following this trend, which Karen has detailed, I do not have food waste. Can anyone else see the gaping hole in their logic?
Zero Waste is our future. Supermarkets should accept this reality and strive harder to achieve it. We strive to find Zero Waste alternatives elsewhere meantime.
Great article Karen.
Another option to the fruit and veg is to get an Organic Box delivery.
You get Veg in season grown usually on the schemes own farms and lots of orders are delivered by one van.
This idea not only removes the excess packaging but also the excess unnecessary chemicals as well.
Hmm.. exactly which foods are only preserved or preserved better with plastic packaging, & which aren’t? It would be good to know!
There was a discussion over at Myzerowaste I think, & people agreed that often food in plastic packaging gets bad SOONER (!!) than loose produce..
I agree food miles are bad.. still, in our supermarkets here in Slovenia it’s difficult to buy local produce – on the farmers’ market (or directly from farmers) at least I have more options to buy local!
How can beans from Argentina or China have less foodmiles than a local farmer’s?
It also depends where you live – in a town with a farmers’ market, you can WALK or cycle to the market (shocking, I know!) or supermarket – and deliveries would be unnecessary..
If deliveries are calculated well they might be better than 100 families all loading up SUVs & driving back & forth for the sole purpose of buying a kilo of bananas.. but it probably also depends if you can pick up groceries (in bulk) on the way from work or such – in that case, no extra food miles..
Plastics are also problematic health-wise (phtalates, bisphenol A, & other iffy chemicals!!) Why would I want to wrap something healthy & ideally organic into a material that leaches possibly dangerous chemicals?!!
Ideally, it would be possible to buy naked food in supermarkets too.. & there would be a heavy campaign for people to start taking notice & doing it like that..
All packaging would either be sustainable & safe (totally chlorine-free, with no heavy metals or other iffy chemicals in paint etc, 100% recyclable / glossy papers are recycled with difficulty & with very toxic chemicals needed, or not at all/ – & really RECYCLED -not burnt! or dumped in China) – OR nonexistent!!
I mean, with peak oil & all, we’re going to start running out of oil for plastics, & using food to make plastics (from corn or dairy) doesn’t make sense with so many people being hungry in the world..
Packaging industry better start realizing this, no?!!
I buy stuff from my local ( organic, but that’s not the point!) greengrocer.
I pick out what I want and either get it weighed “naked” and drop it in my ( jute) bag OR put it in a paper or corn starch plastic bag….
Its all local ish..and there is no worry about the packaging..I compost it…(after reusing it, as far as I can!)
so sorry…whats the issue?
THAT is what everybody used to do..I know ‘cos I am in my late 40’s and I remember this kind of stuff…it is how we USED to shop…before we were told we HAD to have everything “packaged up”
We DIDN’T used to have plastic to wrap stuff in…and we all survived unscathed…
Sorry but I get rather cross when I read “packaging is good ” stuff…maybe for a few items…but most stuff..NO! Fruit and veg on the whole has its own packaging…its called peel….and thats WHY you peel it and then put the peel on the compost heap.
And no its not about freshness either…I am just eating the last of our stored onions, spuds, artichokes, carrots and digging leeks from the garden….
THAT is called “seasonality”..and if shops provided THAT rather than air freighted green beans ..we would have a much smaller CO2 footprint…
Hi everyone – thank you so much for your comments and I am delighted this article instigated such a fantastic debate including representation from the packaging industry. And it’s also good to see it hitting wider shopping issues because packaging is just one element of mechanisms in reducing waste and it’s been a great way of introducing other issues including globalisation, supporting local economies and promoting seasonality.
I used to be the kind of shopper that would drive to the supermarket for a weekly shop to feed my family of four and bring home lots of packaged stuff that had been flown in from thousands of miles away. My fridge would be stuffed with so much it would overflow. Three days later we might not fancy what I’d bought and it would end up being thrown in the landfill bin, packaging included. Shocking I know, especially as it probably cost the taxpayer as much to dump it as I did to buy it. But just as importantly, my municipal recycling bin would also be overflowing well before it was emptied during the fortnightly bin round. The excellent work of LoveFoodHateWaste and RecycleNow sadly shows that I wasn’t on my own. There are millions of families across the UK who still shop, waste and have major recycling issues of their own.
Packaging can protect and I have no issue with that, when it is appropriate for its use. But my own marketing background has taught me that just as Martin acknowledged, packaging is also built to sell and as others have already commented, to protect food that has been flown thousands of miles by creating a demand for produce all year around, circumnavigating issues of seasonality. I used to find avocados in their luxury designed punnets irresistible and would choose them over the loose alternative because it made me feel posh! Likewise buying strawberries in Winter. Gradually that feeling transcended from one of luxury to the norm. And that’s the situation we now face, a world where this is the norm and which cannot sustain this level of retail activity.
Packaging has its role and I agree with the peaches example Karin quoted [not to mention other types of soft fruit :-) ] as well as the overpackaging examples listed by others. But increased commitment to sustainability in packaging is still much needed and it is very encouraging to see some members of the industry taking the environmental issues seriously. For example retailers and manufacturers are signing up to zero waste commitments and are working together to shrink the amount of of materials used, switch to recycled or compostable materials where appropriate and find ways to implement solutions that are more widely recyclable. These are the kind of products that are promoted over at http://www.thezerowastecheckout.com, a website in its infancy but one which will continue to show support for welcome developments in the retail sector.
However, while industry makes its contribution, we cannot escape the fact that householders across the country are also being actively encouraged by local councils by a range of measures to reduce their waste too and REDUCE is the key here, with householders introducing simple alternative choices into their lives that make a difference. And of course these choices will be different for each household concerned, based on income, family members, travel options and routine commitments.
And all it takes is just a little thinking and planning ahead. For example, if you live in the city, it might now make economical or environmental sense to drive to farm shop that is 15 miles away, but if you’re en route to visit a friend, you can build time to shop there, buy loose produce and support a local farmer.
If you have storage space supermarket shopping can also be made easier by buying non-perishables that will last a month, so you don’t have to drive there or have a van drive to you on a weekly basis. Then it becomes easier to pick up fresh produce while you go about your regular routine or support veg boxes as Maisie recommends.
I personally don’t drive out of my way to buy from “green” shops but use the opportunity to buy as I’m passing and if I order online, I stock up on a bulk purchase to reduce regular van deliveries.
One thing’s for certain, as seen in the comments above, those with an active interest in reducing their packaging waste would not switch to unpackaged options and sustain food waste as consequence. Instead they create a balance (either consciously or subconsciously) that their lifestyle is able to support, reducing their dependency on recycling and food waste at the same time. It can also be the beginning of taking further action to live more sustainably.
Compostwoman, I remember the days that you’ve described very well indeed. I may be a little younger (just a little) but I’m old enough to recall the benefits and continue to strive for supporting a local economy that will support my children. And as for growing your own produce, well that’s the best solution ever. Here’s hoping that with my help this year, my garden will also deliver some produce that will be measured in feet instead of miles.
The more I think of punnets of fruit, the more I remember cardboard punnets with a white background and a red and blue design, back in the ‘good old days’. I imagine the fruit went off slightly less quickly as some excess water would have been absorbed by the cardboard, something plastic doesn’t do.
The trouble is, as I’ve been told, it is currently cheaper to make plastic bags and packaging than the paper and cardboard equivalent, and therefore cheaper for retailers and producers to buy. However, if those who predict that oil is getting harder to find and will become very much more expensive within the next ten years are right, then there will be much more incentive to use other materials to make these things with.
Great article, Karen. Going naked is THE way to go!!
Martin, how’s it feel to be an apologist for plastic? And no, the “greenest way to shop” ISN’T to have it delivered by van (what planet are you on?) it’s using your legs – on foot or by bike. 30% of the CO2 emissions of MY weekly shop don’t come from driving as I don’t have a car. You drivers must be so unfit, it sounds like you never get off your ass!