Organic coffee company Percol, has become the first brand to introduce plastic-free packaging for their ground & beans coffee range. They are the first coffee brand to receive the ‘Plastic Free Trust Mark’ from A Plastic Planet. You’ll start to notice the Plastic-Free logo on their new home compostable Ground, Beans and Coffee Bag packaging.
A little-known fact until relatively recently was that most tea bags do in fact contain plastic! More often than not tea bags are or were heat sealed with a small amount of polypropylene and unwittingly consumers have been disposing of them thinking they were more than fit for their compost heaps!
Hands up who has got a larder or cupboard full of out of date baking ingredients that they can’t bear to throw away? Not only did we have a large pile of all of these, such as dried fruit, nuts, oats, and even coconut from 2015, but we had two boxes of Atora suet that had been eyeing me up imploringly since I opted to use butter in my homemade mincemeat last Christmas! I knew I had to make use of them, and one day it dawned on me that the combination that I had to hand would also make perfect bird food cakes!
The amount of plastic in these products is unacceptable! There must be another way! We would love to make the major producers offer a reusable or a biodegradable alternative where they can!
The good news is that Boots has now launched the UK’s first free national recycling scheme for plastic contact lenses and the little plastic cases that we throw away every day. There are several options available to you.
Every year in the UK alone, 5.5 billion plastic bottles aren’t recycled – many of which find their way to landfill or the ocean. We need to change that urgently if we are to address amongst other things, plastic pollution and a bottle deposit return scheme will certainly help.
So it’s my dad’s birthday this week (sadly no longer with) and it is at this time of year that my mind always turns to my childhood memories. My dad was 100% bonafide German, and he loved his food…German food, English food…his life was food! And I am pretty sure this stemmed from the exceptional introduction he had to it as a child. Because my grandmother lived the most resourceful life imaginable bringing up three small boys in a tiny village in wartime Germany.
Today I am meant to be writing about how to have a resourceful Christmas, but frankly, this feels more important. I am coming across more and more cases of products that according to their appearance, and their description, would seem to be ‘plastic free’, recyclable or kinder to the environment because they are ‘biodegradable’!
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