Zero Waste Week 2022 – Day Four
How much litter did you pick up yesterday? Did you find three pieces or was it less or more? We’d love to know. I cleaned up this little lot!
Today I’m going to talk about how trying to solve one problem can sometimes lead to creating another problem. This is something known as “unintended consequences”.
You may remember the days when it was standard practice to go shopping and get a new lightweight plastic bag or five, or six of them even, every time you shopped. Then the plastic bag tax came in, firstly in Wales, if I remember correctly and we had to pay 5p per bag. Long before that many of us had already realised that it was far better to have sturdier bags and reuse them over and over again. You had to buy the sturdier bags. These ‘Bags for Life’ are replaced free of charge when they break. I remember them being 10p. Then there are the woven plastic bags that are priced at around a pound or a euro and last for years even for heavy loads. Over the years, several supermarkets have removed so-called single-use bags altogether. Some have since reintroduced them, and probably taken them away again. The price of the bags has fluctuated too, but I’m told by a number of supermarket sustainability professionals that even when prices are high, they still have a huge number of customers that forget their bags and buy new each time. When I take something somewhere in a bag, I want that bag back, but the times I hear people say ‘Oh don’t worry about the bag, I’ve got loads’ worries me. How many bags do we have per household? And how many do we actually need?
The reusable bags have a much higher carbon footprint to make than the single-use plastic ones. If we are just treating higher carbon footprint bags as single-use we are actually creating way more of a problem. This is called unintended consequences.
There is lots of great work going on to design, build and test infrastructure for re-use but there’s rightly a background concern about creating more problems, in terms of carbon footprint, than we solve. There is a popular slogan amongst my fellow sustainability professionals #rememberthebags.
This serves to remind us that reusable products only contribute to a reduction in waste, resource use and carbon footprint if they are actually reused enough times.
Of course, if you are refilling an old washing up liquid bottle with an ethically made washing up liquid from your local refill outlet you are onto a winner. But if you are buying one of those lovely sturdy bottles of a well publicised refillable make and not actually refilling them, that’s not so good. There are tens of thousands of places you can buy the filled bottles, but places where you can refill the brand are still limited. So it is understandable that the majority are used as single-use.
Fortunately there are a number of smaller companies around the UK offering UK made washing up liquid that you can fill up with and make the most of the excellent reusable bottles. They are too good to go straight into the recycling bin. Between the different brands and different outlets, hopefully many of us have somewhere to refill. Washing up liquid and hand soap are a good place to start if you are new to the refill culture. Try to support companies that have a fully circular supply chain, i.e. they take back and refill the bulk containers too. Otherwise, again we’re wasting valuable resources and carbon footprint by just pushing the waste higher up the supply chain. We need to be saving waste all the way through the supply process, not just where it is visible to customers wanting to do the right thing. To me, anything less frankly just seems like greenwashing!
Day four challenge
So the message today is to reuse your reusables to make sure you are having a positive impact and not an unintended negative one.
Your challenge today is to think about how many times you refill the same container. Whether that’s your coffee cup, your water bottle, your washing up liquid bottle, the old margarine or ice cream tub you fill with porridge oats, it doesn’t matter. We’d love to have an idea of how many uses you’d estimate.
We also want to know what makes you want to ditch your container in favour of a new one. And what would put you off picking up a product in reused packaging? What about these beer bottles?
Look closely at many a beer bottle in Germany and you’ll see the slight calcification around the bottle. Perhaps you’ll see a few scratch marks.Would that put you off your pint? Share your thoughts and get the conversation going. You can tell us on social media or you can add your thoughts in the comments below.
There’s lots of research going on to understand more about numbers of reuse cycles and reasons or motivations that keep things in the cycle or lead to them dropping out of use.
We’d love to know your thoughts … and your actions.
See you tomorrow with an insight into the future of Refill and Reuse.
Hi, I bought loads of plastic containers in the 1970’s when Tupperware parties were all the rage. I still use them every winter to store the produce from our allotment in the freezer.
I have some Tupperware too still used. I have reused the plastic containers from takeaways for years. I freeze left overs or make soup from veg which is not at its best, slightly soft carrots make good soup. I have put the same boxes into the freezer, dish washed them and used them again, probably for nearly 10 years! The takeaway I used closed before the pandemic, so no more plastic boxes.
in the 70s i used to buy lots of refill goods sherry coco cornflakes powered tomato etc then they all vanished was it a higne issue or what ?
I think it was more fashion than hygiene. In the 70s more and more ‘advances’ were being made in the packaging options available and people were being sold the idea of ‘convenience’ and probably ‘hygiene’ too. With packaging up produce, people no longer had to think about how much of something they needed. It was easy to be lured into buying more than we need, because the larger the quantity, the cheaper the price per gramme. No one thought about the waste issue – what if we don’t use it all. And of course we were told it was fine to just throw away the packaging, because that’s what everyone did. Now we are seeing that we have to reduce consumption and that has to start with reducing waste.
I use my refil containers and reusable bags until they are too broken to use anymore. The cloth shopping bags become rags for making rugs or for messy jobs. The plastic is recycled or thrown away is it’s not recyclable.
Have been trying to find an outlet in the high Peak where I could refill containers. At last one has opened in Chinley only 2 miles away where I go for Tai Chi and coffee.The shop is run by volunteers and is making a small profit. Hooray. We are spreading the word.
I would like to see glass bottles for beer and wine etc become standard, then they could easily be reused rather than breaking the glass up. I wouldn’tmind having the same bottles as we do that with milk anyway