Plastic Free Day 2

So, Day 2 of PlasticFreeMe and I thought I’d share my family’s meals and the waste produced from those, so hear goes

Breakfast 

Cereal & Milk, tea, coffee – waste produced = teabag (which went into the food recycling bin), coffee pod from the Tassimo. The cereal & milk both have plastic containers but we didn’t finish them today so they’ve gone back in the cupboard/fridge.

There used to be a Tassimo recycling bin in Sainsburys in Marlow but last time I looked it wasn’t there, according to the Tassimo website the nearest one now is Sainsburys in Maidenhead. I did apply to them ages ago to see if I could get my own recycling bin as those little pods going in the bin vex me and my family have a serious Tassimo habit (not me as I don’t drink coffee or hot chocolate) – still waiting to hear from them.

Lunch 

As we are all now back at work/school/college this meant packed lunches. Youngest (D3) and middle (D2) daughters had a bento box each filled with a savoury Pizza pastry (bought from Tesco but D2 and I have plans to make our own), cucumber sticks & dip (hummus for D3 and sour cream for D2) , chorizo sausage & cherry tomatoes (D3), yoghurt (D2), clementine (D3) and banana (D2) and finally some homemade graham cracker toffee. They each had a bottle filled with blackcurrant squash.

I am going to digress here to talk about the toffee . We first made this before Christmas to put in the Goody Bags we gave out as Christmas presents. It’s called Christmas Crack Toffee  and is on the i heart naptime blog here   as well as the Christmas Crack we also made some Peppermint Crunch from the same blog, the recipe is here  we made ours with gluten free graham crackers from Kinnikinnick Foods and it is absolutely amazing. We have quite a bit left and don’t plan to wait till next Christmas to make some more!

Anyway, returning to our meal plan! D1 made sushi the night before for her lunch – first time she had made it herself so lots of supervision but she did a very good job. I took a ciabbatta roll and the last bit of brie from the Christmas cheese board.

Waste produced – banana & clementine peel which went into our food recycling bin (our local council takes food waste and it is processed to produce energy and agricultural fertiliser), paper used to wrap the pizza slices when we bought them at Tesco which went into the paper recycling bin

Dinner

This evening’s meal plan was for Spaghetti Bolognaise. Minced beef & Soya mince were already in my freezer, onions, pepper & garlic in the vegetable rack, bacon in the fridge and pasta in the cupboard so the only additional purchases were a tin of tomatoes and a carrot. Our family contains two vegetarians, myself and D2, and a coeliac, D1, and so I made one ragu sauce with minced beef and bacon and one with soya mince and two lots of pasta, one GF and one not.

Waste produced = onion skin, pepper seeds & stalk and garlic skin which went into the food recycling; tin from the tomatoes and plastic tray (green not black!) from the mince which both go into our mixed recycling. The soya mince was in a plastic bag but I only used half so the bag has gone back in the freezer for another day as did the bacon in it’s plastic tray back in the fridge and the pasta in it’s plastic bags back in the cupboard.

Overall pretty good day with one exception. I was reading an article on the Friends of the Earth website ‘9 really good alternatives to plastic’ which has alerted me to the fact that most teabags contain plastic. WHAT!!! I live on cups of tea and am very concerned to learn that the teabags, which I had thought were compostable, contain microplastics which are then being put into the soil with that compost. Apparantly there is a small amount of polypropolene added to the bags to ensure that when they are heat-sealed they don’t then come open in the box or your cup. I did some more digging and found an article on the blog Moral Fibres which has detailed some of the main brands and whether they contain plastic or not.

For me, as I own a vast collection of teapots and tea infusers I am going to dust them off and start buying loose leaf tea…