Convenience and zero waste or plastic-free do not always go hand in hand. Today, in particular, I want to talk about pizza. Of course, I know you can make pizza, but that is just not CONVENIENT, and sometimes you just feel lazy and want some quality junk food.

Our favourite supermarket pizzas are the make-your-own ones in store at Asda. They are very tasty, you can choose the toppings you want, and they are reasonably priced for a treat, BUT they come plastic wrapped.

I had scoured our local supermarkets, both the fresh aisles and the frozen, for plastic-free pizza, but to no avail. And then I spotted my little-used cake carrier in the back of the cupboard, and a cunning plan formed in my mind.

We went to Asda, toting our cake carrier, and asked if they would put our pizzas in the box, without the plastic wrap. And guess, what? They did, quite happily.  Hurrah – now we can have super tasty, plastic-free pizza! Of course, a large round cake tin would also do the job should you not have a cake carrier. Unfortunately we only have rectangular tins!

The pizzas were on cardboard circles, which didn’t look dirty, so I have put them in the recycling in the hope they don’t get booted out as contaminated, but next time, I might try asking for them without the cardboard, to go nearly zero waste (except for the sticker).

Pizza in a cake carrier!

We have only eaten them the same day so far, but I would have thought, given a large enough beeswax wrap, they could be frozen. Pizza-sized beeswax wrap anyone?!

Do you have any other zero- waste convenience food hacks? Please do comment below!

When we decided to start plastic-free July, we opted to start 5 days early so that a) I could make a trip down to the Waitrose Unpacked store in Oxford to do the monthly shop, and if I wanted to do this without Little MIH, I had to go the week before; and b) I knew we were going on a camping holiday on 26th July, and trying to find plastic-free sources for everything we needed whilst away seemed far too difficult!

However, buoyed by the success of our plastic-free July month, we decided to continue to be as plastic-free as possible. And it wasn’t as difficult as we had thought, and in fact, as outlined below, we came back with a few more ideas to look into back at home. It turns out the SW of England is a bit of an anti-plastic mecca. We weren’t visiting Bristol, but there were 8 hits on the map there!

Before we left I googled ‘plastic free map’ and came up with this page from The Beeswax Wrap Company. As well as zero waste shops, it has a map for milk refill locations, which was a really exciting as it was a concept I hadn’t come across before and milk seemed the biggest hurdle to a plastic-free holiday, as we have found it so difficult at home to get milk in bottles from anyone other than Milk & More. Plus, camping with no fridge means you can’t just take a supply of milk for the whole holiday. So we earmarked a couple of these for touristing visits, and it looked as though we might be able minimise plastic-free milk, as long as our cool box allowed it!

It turned out though, that as well as those on the map, there were normal shops all over the place – local butchers, village stores – that were embracing the zero waste ethos, and encouraging the use of customer’s own containers, and providing other products plastic/packaging-free.

So here is a brief run-down of our holiday purchases (spoiler alert…we were not perfect, we had a big fail near the end!!).

Preparation

We took 4 pre-prepared frozen meals with us, in the cool box. I don’t think we would have managed more than this with only the cool box – the last 2 meals were defrosted, although still well chilled. We also took tinned and fresh ingredients for a further one-pot meal, and various meal and snack items, such as a small loaf of bread, fruit and vegetables, homemade flapjack, cashew nuts, pasta, rice, jars of pesto, canned tomatoes and pulses.

Day 1

We just used up things we had brought with us. We forgot to properly plan for milk to take with us at the start, but had a carton of UHT that had been kicking round the cupboard for a few months for a milk emergency, so we classed this as one, and used this for the first 2 days.

Day 2

We were camping near a little village called Saintt Briavels. We popped into a the small village shop – The Pantry – and it turned out that the owner (who is selling the shop, so I am not sure whether the change of hands will change the ethos) was also trying to minimise plastic use. He sold local cheeses, with the option of waxed paper to wrap them (luckily compostable – I forgot to check until he had wrapped our Somerset brie and goat’s cheese), had cornstarch-based pots for olives, and had a sign up encouraging customers to use their own containers. As the first milk refill station we planned to visit was after this first campsite, we had thought we would have to buy plastic-bottle milk until we travelled on further, but we found milk in glass bottles here, so bought one – result!

We also visited the Eco Pantry in Newnham on Severn, as we realised the amount of muesli we had brought with us was not going to last – we would usually eat porridge, but the effort of washing up a porridgey pan without a dishwasher is a step too far for us on holiday! It had a great stock of dried goods. We bought ingredients for muesli, as well as dried apricots which we haven’t had for ages at home as I hadn’t found them locally unpackaged. It worked out quite pricey but was a lovely holiday treat. We also picked up unpackaged broccoli to go with the pre-prepared chicken dijon and allotment potatoes (our first decent crop!) for tea.

Day 3

Ice creams in cones!

Day 4

We went back to The Pantry in Saint Briavel to buy milk first thing for breakfast, but it turned out that they don’t always have this in stock for ad hoc customers. It sounds like they act as the receiver for milk deliveries for a lot of the village, receiving 200 bottles a week, and if a customer doesn’t collect then they sell that milk in the shop instead. The lady very kindly though let us buy one of the bottles they had for shop use (decanted into an empty (clean) wine bottle we had brought with us (as they needed to return the milk bottle), so we got away for another day with no plastic-bottled milk.

We also stocked up on two more pieces of cheese – Tintern and Worcester Hops – this time without any packaging, straight into our container, and got a non-wrapped cucumber – hurrah, I have been missing cucumber!

We were travelling on to the next campsite, and had the first milk refill location en-route – Brent House Farm. They have a small farm shop too, which was closed on the day we visited, but the milk vending machine is open 24/7. We had gone armed with empty wine bottles to fill again, but there was a second vending machine with bottles for £1. So we got a couple of bottles, as these will be useful for freezing milk in future to take on holiday, or to have ready for when we get back from holiday.

The lady who runs it was very friendly, and came over to help us use the machines (although there did look to be very clear instructions!). Apparently she got the idea when she was in New Zealand, where milk vending machines are much more common. I think she said hers came from Switzerland – another place where they are more common.

Just checked out their Facebook page again, and gutted the shop was closed – it looks like they do some lovely homemade cakes! We will have to try and pop in when we are next in that beck of the woods.

At £1 per litre, the milk was much cheaper than we pay for delivery at home and it was SO tasty. If it was local, I’d definitely do a regular milk run to get milk from there. An amazing treat with our homemade muesli for the next few days. We got 2 litres (approximately 4 pints) and managed to get it to last (mostly) in our cool box at the next campsite, where there was a stream to pop the box in, and freezer block swaps.

Day 5

We popped into Minehead for brunch as it was pouring with rain in the morning, and googled a butchers – Stuart Lowen’s Butchers and Farm Shop – on the edge of town, to see if we could get some sausages. This place turned out to be a bit of an unexpected gem – as well as encouraging the use of customer’s own containers for the butchers, they also had dried goods refills, Farm Fayre frozen food (frozen veg, fruit and pastries, without packaging – I still need to visit our ‘local’ stockist – 30 mins from home unfortunately), mini milk vending machines (woo hoo – this was not on our map!) and, most excitingly a peanut butter making machine, with which you could use your own jar (or purchase one in the shop).

Also topped up on some groceries at Co-op. Cheese in wax was a useful find, but we had to go for the mixed foil/paper wrapped butter. We thought we had done well on glass bottles of tonic water but unfortunately realised later in the week that they had plastic labels.

Day 6

Ice cream cones!

Day 7

On our way to our next campsite, we went through Minehead to stock up.

 

Unfortunately Morrisons wouldn’t put ham in our own container, so we didn’t buy any. (Morrisons replied within a few days to the email I subsequetly sent: ‘Raw Butchery and Fish only accept your own container at present because these products are cooked by customers to ensure they are safe to eat. Items on the deli counter are not cooked after being in the container could be a risk to food safety. This is something we are still looking into’.) So we popped to Tesco to complete our supermarket shop.

Then we went over to Stuart Lowen’s and refilled our milk bottles, bought some unpackaged coffee beans to bring home, as they were very reasonably priced, and tried out the peanut butter machine. The peanut butter machine was very quick and efficient – it was more expensive than we usually pay, but it was not just no plastic (which you will know we had been struggling with from previous posts), but zero waste, which I would consider paying for again. However, it has inspired me to try making reconsider making my own – watch this space!

 

Did you spot our major fail above?!!? A real lack of planning here. No camping beach holiday would be complete without fish and chips on the beach, right? Unfortunately, I forgot to pack the tomato ketchup. (We have a bit of a rep for this – we use to quite often come from mountain biking trips (pre Little MIH) with a new bottle of ketchup, so we’d often have a  backlog of 3 or 4 bottles to get through!) And you can’t have fish and chips without ketchup, right? Double unfortunately, we forgot to buy ketchup in a glass bottle when we were in a large supermarket earlier in the day, and so had to rely on Co-op, which did not come up trumps.

Also, Mr MIH went into the nearby town of Braunton to investigate a shop – Nourish – that was listed on the Beeswax Wraps zero waste map to see if they knew of any local milk refill stations. They confirmed the closest refill station was one we had already identified about 35 mins drive away, but said that a lot of the farmers locally would be willing to fill up bottles if asked. This is definitely a point to try at home – we are not quite so surrounded by dairy farms as in the SW, but there are local milk producers which deliver to nearby villages, but not to ours, so I have on my ‘to do’ list to check to see if they would be willing to do refills, as this may work out a lot cheaper than Milk & More, and also saves on carbon emissions by buying more locally.

They also pointed us in the direction of the small local grocery shop next door (John Patt’s), which had milk in milkman style glass bottles, for only 65p a pint – far cheaper than Milk & More!

Day 8

Ice creams in cones!

We visited Saunton Sands, and while walking on the beach picked up a couple of pieces of plastic. On our way out there was a stall set up encouraging people to pick up plastic – one family had filled 3 sandcastle buckets very quickly apparently – so we were able to drop our plastic finds off.

Day 9

We bought some sausages to go in our pasta for tea. The local butchers had a sign up encouraging the use of customer’s own containers. We also popped into John Patt’s , and picked up some meat pie, and also some cake, packaging free, for our lunch.

Day 10

We came home! We still had enough milk from our refills in Minehead to get us through to our next Milk & More delivery (helped by a fridge at the last campsite)! Completely unexpectedly, we managed a whole holiday without having to buy plastic-bottled milk, and without having to change what we were eating to suit that. And even more surprisingly, the milk cost us far less than at home.

Rubbish summary

All the campsites we stayed at had good facilities for plastic, glass, metal, paper and card recycling, which we used. We didn’t fancy carrying around food waste for 10 days, and as we didn’t fins any food composting facilities at the campsites, this went into the general rubbish bins. Maybe something we can improve on for next time – there may have been local composting facilities, but this sin’t something we thought to check out at the time. The only other things we threw away which we could have brought home to compost were matches.

Here is the waste we brought home:

Clockwise, from top left: waxed paper from cheese – had hoped to put this in teh compost, but I am now not sure what the wax is made from, so will landfill this; butter paper – for compost; Two Farmers crisp packet (taken with us) – for compost; ibuprofen packets – for separation and recycling/land fill bin; cheese wax casing – for some reason I thought you could compost this! I don’t think you can. I have seen people make candles from the wax, or use it for wax wraps, so I may keep this and try and re-use it; UHT tetrapak – for recycling; butter wrapper – for landfill; matches – for compost; and ketchup – for consumption of contents, then recycling.

Are there any other zero-waste hot spots in the UK that would also make great camping holidays? Let us know in the comments below!