A weekly shop day today. It was noticeable that it took Mr MIH considerably longer than usual, as he had to visit 4 different places (Aldi, Tesco, Waitrose, and the local veg market). And we had to say goodbye to peanut butter, as he was not able to find it without an anti-tamper strip around the lid of the jar.
But hello to Waitrose cheese from their deli. Although the cheese does meet the criteria of the challenge, we still need to come up with a longer term plan, as the cheese does come in a plastic wrapper to Waitrose, it is just that we only bought a small part of the large block. Usually we would buy cheese at half the price from Tesco, and to minimise packaging would just buy the whole block, wrapped in plastic (as Tesco won’t open a new block for us (and the deli is really just an array of pre-wrapped pieces from the larger blocks). I think the 3 options we have are: 1) continue buying cheese from Tesco as one large block; 2) try and source somewhere locally that does not receive cheese plastic-wrapped; 3) buy cheese in wax – there are varying reports whether this is compostable, so we could give that a try, and/or the wax could be reused – for example for candles, wax wraps, or as fire starters.
We stocked up on 4 bread batons, and made these into garlic bread which has gone in the freezer. These were cost neutral, as the batons were fairly pricey as we had to get them from Waitrose. We may try a cheaper long baguette from the market another time, with the extra bonus of fewer unpopular end pieces of bread!
There was still some plastic that came in. One type was apple stickers (again!). The other was a conscious decision to make the most of Aldi’s school uniform offers and buy some socks and tights. The socks, at least, would come under the category of underwear, which is not something we are considering buying second hand at the moment, and the plastic in the packaging seemed the minimum we would ever likely manage – 4 small pieces of sellotape for the tights, and one small piece of sellotape and two little plastic ‘tags’ to hold the socks together on each of the socks packets.
Make It Happy 
