As people strive to waste less and reduce plastic in their lives, more and refill, plastic-free and bulk commodity shops and services are cropping up. Not only does this offer people a route to buy their weekly staples minus plastic, but it also offers the opportunity to explore new ingredients, ways of shopping and ultimately ways of consuming, which has to be a good thing.
With more and more people turning to filtered water away from bottled water, inevitably the next question will be, can I recycle my water filter?!
If you are looking for somewhere to recycle your asthma inhaler, then you will be pleased to know that a recycling service is available in many pharmacies and GP surgeries. The Complete the Cycle programme recycles asthma inhalers of all brands and manufacturers them into new products.
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Hands up who has got a larder or cupboard full of out of date baking ingredients that they can’t bear to throw away?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.
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