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!

Given what we have deemed to be the success of our plastic-free July, we thought it would be interesting to see whether it was more or less expensive than an average month. A comment we have received a few times is ‘Won’t it be more expensive?’. I can understand the reasoning as it is something we have taken into consideration – and extra cost is something we are willing to embrace if necessary – as many things seem to be more expensive plastic free – fruit and vegetables in the supermarket, milk in glass bottles, and meat from a butchers, for example.

Luckily, we have already been tracking our expenses each month, which makes it reasonably easy to make a comparison. Over the last year, our average food and grocery shopping bill (this includes non-food items that we buy at the supermarket) has been £346 per month. For the 31 days for which we did Plastic-free July we spent…drum roll…£336, so £10 LESS than our average. This was surprising, even to us, as it felt like we did a LOT of shopping. Our monthly spending does fluctuate a fair bit, so it will be interesting to see how this plays out over the long term, but it is very promising that we didn’t spend a fortune more, especially given it was the first month we had paid the premium for glass bottle milk and bought all our meat plastic free.

I think there is potential for even more savings for anyone who hasn’t dipped their toe into zero waste yet. We had already implemented a number of changes gradually over the past year which have helped reduce costs as well as reduce waste – such as buying fruit and veg from our local market rather than from the supermarket – so if we hadn’t already been doing these things, the decrease would have been even more.  For interest, I have gone back through our spending log, and our average monthly spend has actually decreased by £40 per month since we started reducing our waste – a saving of nearly £500 per year! Not all of these saving may have been directly linked to reducing waste, as we were making other changes in parallel, such as simplifying our meals, but even so, it is reassuring that, despite choosing some more expensive options, such as packaging-free dried goods (such as pasta, rice, oats and lentils) we have still been able to reduce our average grocery spend.

I will say though that there was a definite cost in terms of time and convenience. Some of this was one-off investments in time, such as investigating various suitable butchers, and how best to order, which we shouldn’t have to do again now we have that organised. But still, there is no getting away from the fact that going plastic-free or zero waste is not the convenient option, as it is not possible at the moment to buy everything all in one place, and we have had to switch from shopping at one supermarket, to shopping at probably 4 or 5 different places reasonably regularly, plus a few other less frequent shops (less than once every couple of months) at other places. Monthly meal planning, and a linked main monthly shop, has helped to reduce the overall number of shopping trips, but again it takes time to plan, and is not easy convenience.

I think that is why the Waitrose Unpacked trial, which has been recently expanded to 4 other stores (none nearer to us unfortunately, despite my pleading feedback to come to Daventry!) is so exciting. It is real chance to make zero waste convenient enough that it appeals to a much wider audience. Rather than the supermarkets peddling their addictive convenience and blow the environmental consequences, shoppers could be lured into choices that in the end will benefit everyone.

Have you noticed a change in spending after starting to go plastic-free or zero waste? Have you got any tips for reducing time spent and/or increasing convenience?

 

I did some food shopping for our holiday today (9 nights camping).  The shop was plastic-free apart from a bottle of sun cream. I don’t feel ready to branch out into plastic-free varieties yet. I suspect (although I have not investigated this at all) that they may also be more natural type products, and I have tried something like that on Little MIH (but with packaging) when she was a baby – it was thick and left a white sheen, contained beeswax, so made her hair instantly greasy, and seemed to give her spots – the effect was a little like a 6 month acne-riven teenager. Also, perhaps more importantly, I had not been at all prepared, needing the sun cream the same day, and unfortunately preparation is key a lot of the time for zero-waste packaging.

The worst fail was getting home and realising we already had spare sunscreen in the cupboard, so I needn’t have bought it. And, I blame hungriness and lack of thinking capacity, I bought one with a pump, when one without would have at least been much more recyclable! Triple doh!

Fail

Suncream bottle.

Day 28 – no purchases, but I did have a bread success!

It still wasn’t quite back to previous normalness, but it didn’t look like someone had sat on it. Unfortunately I haven’t quite identified the problem as I, unscientifically, changed maybe three variables at once – I made sure to err on the lower side for the water quantity (I’ve just realised I may do better weighing the water, as 280ml is quite difficult to measure in a jug, although I suspect the type of flour will vary the water quantity of water needed); I didn’t add any seeds this time, in case they interfere with the kneading process; and I opened a new sachet of yeast.

Day 29 – I forgot to make an extra loaf of bread today, so Mr MIH may be having slightly smaller sandwiches than normal tomorrow, as he uses up the abnormally small loaves. Still, the each slice of bread should be as filling as normal, but just be more space efficient.

Finally cracked the elusive packaging-free sausages, in time for family visiting. I went over to the nearest town with a butchers, where they make their own sausages on site (so no transporting them in the same trays I would otherwise buy them in the supermarket), and it was only ‘Sausage Wednesday’ – £2 per kg off all sausages! They still came in at just under 20% more expensive than the Tesco Finest sausages we would usually buy (one of the rare products we actually opt to buy from a supermarket ‘premium’ range), but compared to the extra cost of some things we have opted for, this did not seem to horrific. And the best bit? They actually thanked me for using my own container (I did ask, but hadn’t noticed the sign on the counter encouraging customers to use their own containers) and apologised profusely for being legally obliged to give me labels for each type of sausage (I bought four), and stuck them on a separate piece of paper for me, instead of my box lid, which has several remnants of old stickers on it! I’ll definitely go back there – it was so nice for someone to be enthusiastic and helpful about what we are trying to do.

 

A plastic-free day today! But it does feel a little like we are limping to the end of plastic-free July. I suppose part of the issue is trying to change so many things at once, which is precisely the approach we have avoided up until now (we have been gradually decreasing waste for the last year). First there were the yoghurt issues, until finally the yoghurt ran out so we couldn’t make any more, and today we have had serious bread issues. Two rather flat loaves. I swapped flour after the first one, in case that was the issue, but still the same issue with previously tried and tested flour. They have risen a bit, but not the full whack, and they crust on top looks a little ‘stringy’. Please feel free to comment below with any ideas of what may be wrong. I’m wondering if the amount of water was too high. The other sadder possibility is that I broke our bread maker yesterday when I forgot to put the stirrer in.

Little MIH and I started preparing today for our camping trip today, by making some flapjacks to take with us, so we have some useful snacks to hand. It turned out we didn’t have enough porridge oats (luckily before we started melting anything), so we had to have an emergency trip to get some. Luckily, we now buy these from Aldi, rather than our local zero waste store, who we order from and then go and pick up from several days later.

Little MIH did complain and say that she just wanted to get the ones in plastic, as it is a longer trip for us to Aldi (I’m hoping we minimise our vehicle impact by having an electric car, charged with solar). They turned out a little crumbly, but tasty. It is a long time since I have made flapjacks. Mr MIH got rather into it at one point before Little MIH was born. There were lots of elaborate additions, including venturing into chocolate drops at one point. We stopped making them though when we realised our waistlines had crept up and this was probably attributable to the flapjacks! And tasting these today, I can see where the issue lay – they are extremely tasty, in an oozing butter and sugar kind of way. Definitely a holiday-only treat!

Mr MIH had some issues at Sainsbury’s today when getting his lunch supplies for the week, after thinking he had cracked it last week. This week the issue was that they did not want to put 2 different items in the same container. He pointed out that they had done it last week (as could be seen by the two stickers still on the lid!), which is why he only bought one container this week, but no go. I think this has been one of the most frustrating things about trying to go no-plastic in supermarkets – the inconsistency, between different branches of the same chain, and also between different people at the same shop.

Little MIH has been pretty on board with trying the toothpaste tablets recently, despite finding them ‘too spicy’. In fact, the spiciness has had the added benefit that it encourages her to spit out the paste made from the tablet, rather than swallow toothpaste like she normally does. So even if the tablets do have more fluorine than kiddy toothpaste, she is probably actually consuming less. We just have to get in there really quickly for the brushing before she spits! Mr MIH also noted that her bamboo toothpaste has lasted a lot longer than her plastic ones used to. I think the plastic ones had a nice soft plastic moulded head, which was just nice and squidgy to chew down on, and so the bristles would get wrecked very quickly from the chewing. Although she has never complained about the bamboo brush, and has embraced it, I suspect hard bamboo is just not that tasty and comforting to chew on. So although the price of the bamboo toothbrush was three times that of the toothbrushes we used to buy for her (we bought this one), long term I don’t think the cost will be three times as much (until she gets to the point she would have stopped chewing her toothbrush anyway of course which, who knows, may have already happened, and was nothing to do with the bamboo toothbrush!).

Any bread maker troubleshooters out there with some top tips on how to fix my bread?!

 

Yesterday was a plastic-free day I think. Little MIH had the option of water in a bottle at her pre-school graduation but said she didn’t want it, as squash was on offer from a jug into a re-usable plastic beaker.

Mr MIH had a weekend away with his brothers. They went wild camping for one night, and while the other 2 shopped in the supermarket beforehand, Mr MIH opted to wait outside and look after his brother’s dog to technically keep to the rules and ‘not buy’ and items with plastic packaging!

Today was also plastic free (no shopping again!). An epic fail though was forgetting to put the mixer arm in the bread maker until 10 mins before the bread maker program ended. There was a very hot layer of flour, covered with a slightly fried and crispy top layer, where the butter and water were. And it was meant to be a loaf with some of my nice organic flour I got on my birthday. Sad times.

Fails

None (plastic-wise)

Unsolicited items

None.

I went shopping again today for a bit more of the weekly shop, and we still haven’t got everything. Some veg from the market. I forgot the white cabbage, which was unwrapped in Waitrose, but did have a massive sticker on it which I suspect is non-recyclable (will have to investigate further). Topped up on cheese in Waitrose. They have obviously been drilled on being helpful to people wanting to use their own containers, or maybe just being helpful in general). The woman was extremely friendly, making sure she cut the block just right to fit in my pot in one piece. Unfortunately though, she needed to put a plastic film sheet on the scales to weight the cheese (I presume there is no tare feature on the scales?), and the cheese came from a block wrapped in plastic. I bought it, but as before, it is fairly pointless when we could just buy a whole block, in a similar fashion (except perhaps with less friendliness) for half the price in Tesco. They were also very friendly when I asked about the packaging the sausages on the deli came in (to reach the deli). It was much the same as in Tesco – similar to that found on the shelves (albeit a slight improvement of a clear tray over a non-recyclable black tray). So no sausages today. I am going to try a butchers in a nearby town next week, that apparently makes their own sausages on site, so hopefully no packaging!

Went for it and bought the toothpaste for Little MIH.

The exciting find of the day was block Vanilla ice cream in Tesco (not our most local one, but next to the veg market, so easily doable on a general Friday shopping trip).

I have been directed to this peanut butter recipe by Granny MIH (thank you!) to try and solve my peanut butter woes. I’m not convinced by the capability of my food processor, but my give it a try at some point. It looks tasty.

 

Time for the third weekly rubbish review. It’s certainly seemed more challenging this week, probably as we use up things in the house, and can only put off not buying more difficult things, such as cheese and meat, for so long.

What has come in

Fails

Apple stickers; small amount of sellotape from socks and tights packaging; little clothes tags. A minisicule amount this week. I’ve probably cheated a little in that e must have bought some butter, so there should be a butter wrapper in there. Still, the stuff I have included comes to 1g.

Unsolicited items

Just a sweet packet and chocolate wrapper and box inner extra (and probably a window envelope or two) I think.

What has gone out

And, for your delight and delectation, I give you our week 3 rubbish….

Plastic – recyclable

A slight increase over last week – 55g. Still, the biscuits we were given were very tasty…Note the chopped up ibuprofen packaging (I still need to check that the plastic can actually be added to our recycling!).

Non-recyclable waste

A big jump up from last week – 90g (vs 52g last week). I think it probably mostly comes from the bag for a box of wine. We are no longer buying these! Most of the other items are old things we have been using up, and either will not buy these again, or have plastic-free replacements. Of note is the festival wristband – we also got 2 more of these type bands from going swimming at the weekend, though they obviously have not made it in to the rubbish yet!  I’ll try asking if we can not have the wristbands next time and see what they say – I suspect the answer will be no, as they use them to count people in.

 

 

I part did the weekly shop early today. Sorry, no exciting shopping pics – I know you will be hugely disappointed. Some of the more difficult purchases to get tomorrow. This includes sausages, which I nearly bought from the deli in Tesco, but because I needed more than the quantity on the counter, the lady got some more out – and they were just wrapped exactly as they would be on the shelf – black tray with plastic wrap, so I gave up on that idea. It’s a bit more tricky than previously, as our local butcher has just closed in the last couple of weeks.

I had planned to go to the deli in Waitrose, but looking on their website, I may have the same problem – it lists packaging, including a tray and wrap. It may just be when you order online, so I will check. The next option is the local market, but otherwise I may have to go with plan B meal-wise.

Tomorrow I am going to have our biggest intentional fail and buy Little MIH some more toothpaste. She was quite happy to try the toothpaste tablets, and didn’t object to the chewing or powderyness, but she did find them ‘too spicy’ (and they also have an adult level of fluoride, so not ideal).

Fails

Apple stickers – we have given up on these they seem inevitable.

Avocado sticker – I could have waited until going to the market tomorrow. Naughty.

Unsolicited items

Pre-school graduation day for Little MIH, and we came home with a plastic-laminated certificate and a plastic covered star medal, with plastic letter beads.