Top Tips To Reduce Your Plastic Consumption
Plastics are very cheap to produce and they’re pretty much indestructible. As a society we use plastic to store and transport and load of items, our use of plastics is completely out of control and the impact it’s caused to our planet is astronomical. Less than 10% of plastics have ever been recycled, it’s mostly thrown into landfill, incinerated, or even left in our oceans and water ways.
It’s important that we reduce our plastic consumption globally. There are small changes that we can all make each day, that when combined will have a huge positive impact on our world. If 1 in 10 of use in the UK started to refill once a week, there’d be 340 million less plastic bottles a year! Let’s look at our 6 top tips to reduce your plastic consumption:
Take Stock
If you’re serious about cutting back on single use plastics,it might be time to take stock of the amount you’re using daily. Start collecting all the plastics you use in your household over a week to really understand the scale of your problem and the personal impact you’re having on our planet. Don’t be embarrassed, we all use far more than we realise!
Reuse and Refill
Did you know that 1 million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute?! Shocking, isn’t it? 2.5 billion coffee cups are thrown away each year in the UK and 11 billion pieces of plastic packaging from our lunches end up in waste. By choosing to start reusing and refilling we can really reduce this. Consider topping up your own coffee cup, carrying tupawares for your lunches, and getting your fruit and vegetables from the baskets rather than pre-packaged in plastic.
Zero Waste Shops
Have you heard of the Refill App? It shows your great places to fill up your own water bottles, coffee cups, and even shows you the locations of zero waste shops around the UK. You can stock up your cleaning supplies, kitchen cupboard essentials, and household supplies! This novel idea is helping to make single use plastics a thing of the past.
Stop Flushing Your Wipes
11 billion wet wipes are used in the UK each year, and unfortunately a load of these are flushed down toilets. Littering from toilet wipes has increased 700% in the last decade and a lot of them contain harmful microplastics. So, stopping flushing your wipes, it’s a really crappy thing to do.
Ready Meals and Convenience Foods
Pots of houmous, meals for one, and bottles of fruit smoothies– we’re all far to used to convenience. The idea that we can drop into our local supermarket, throw a plastic pot in the oven and know we’ll have our meal in ready to go in under an hour. But, with a little prior planning we can curb this harmful habit. Consider making your meals in slow cookers ahead of time,or blending your own smoothies and dips!
Women’s Sanitary Products
Did you know that the fifth most commonly washed-up products on Europe’s beaches are menstrual products? More of them wash ashore than coffee cups, straws and cutlery. Many people don’t even realise these products contain plastics, but a standard box of pads can contain as much plastic as 5 carrier bags. Consider using some of the reusable items available nowadays.
