Plastic-free July: Myth-Busting

This season it’s plastic-free July, and although going plastic-free is not just for summer, the world is rapidly waking up to the notion that plastic is not fantastic. Shifting towards the circular economy under what feels like the ticking time bomb of climate change is no mean feat, especially in a complex arena. So grab your favourite re-usable mug, as we honestly bust some of the most predominant prevailing myths (the good, the bad and the ugly) around going ‘plastic-free’.

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Plastic-Free Is More Expensive

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At an individual level, ditching the plastic doesn’t have to mean that the remaining choices are no longer pliable. While many stores have capitalised on some rather pricey alternatives, going back to basics can be a much simpler solution. For example, some household kitchen items make great bathroom replacements, and are often kinder to the skin.

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A great example is DIY deodorants based on baking soda. Many products such as shampoos, face washes and aluminium-based deodorants actually strip the body of its natural oils and pH and create a vicious cycle, whereby your hair gets greasier faster or you smell worse without using a roll-on.

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It takes some time for the body to re-adjust but food-based items can be a handy way to bridge the gap. You don’t have to fork out a fortune on trendy ‘zero waste’ kits to feel like you’re doing it properly. There’s no such thing as ‘doing it properly’ as everyone’s lifestyle demands are slightly different, and buying loose fruit and vegetables from your local green grocer can often be cheaper than the supermarket.

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Plastic-Free Is Too Time-Consuming

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Plastic-free often does require planning - remembering to take your reusable tote to the supermarket, not leaving the coffee cup at home, and remembering to restock on your favourite household items in time because they’re still not widely available at the local supermarket.

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However going plastic-free doesn’t have to entail a quantum leap from hero to zero. It’s all about the small, daily baby steps and lifetime habits. Small changes take some time to get used to, but eventually they become so ingrained in the new way of being that you forget they were ever missing. Members such as Bower Collective also offer a handy delivery service for sustainable household goods, so you need never worry about re-stocking again.

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Any Alternative Is Best

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If we decided to go plastic-free, vegan, and reduced all food waste-age tomorrow, there’s no denying that it would severely restrict options in an economy based on convenience. Bottom-up pressure is a necessary component of voting with purchasing power and instigating higher level change in a politically-resistant arena. However the most important aspects is instigating awareness and research into the nuance of such complex changes.

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Like all solutions, plastic isn’t all bad all the time, and going plastic-free could have some unintended consequences that need to be looked into a little deeper. For example, biodegradable alternatives are only beneficial if disposed of properly. The UK’s waste infrastructure is not currently setup to deal with biodegradable materials.

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To break down properly they need to be sent to an industrial composting facility or anaerobic digestor. These facilities do exist for food waste, but only about 50% of households have access to food waste collections and councils don’t always accept waste that has packaging in it. If it’s not accepted, it then ends up in a landfill with regular waste. At present, this is still the most likely outcome, leading to methane production - which contributes far more to climate change than carbon dioxide.

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Plastic-Free Is A Simple Solution

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Going plastic-free is important because it’s part of a larger ecosystem of change. However, when you compare materials from a whole lifecycle perspective, plastic often comes out favourably. For example, plastic is lightweight, so requires far less carbon in transportation than heavier materials such as glass. Nor does it have the mining impacts of metals like aluminium.

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This is not an endorsement of plastic but aims to encourage what is at the heart of the movement as a whole - rethinking what and how we use things more carefully, under many different lenses including both the long and short-term. Often the solutions to the problems of today create the issues of tomorrow, which is what we may see when we push the visible downstream consequences of plastic-waste further upstream, under the impression of ‘out of sight, out of mind’.

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Reusing shopping bags is key to reducing their environmental impacts. But to have a lower carbon footprint than a single-use plastic carrier bag, a paper bag needs to be reused 3 times. A cotton bag would need to be used 131 times. These figures are even higher if the plastic bag is reused as a bin liner, which they commonly are. Also, when looking at other environmental considerations such as toxic pollution of land and water, acid rain, resource depletion and deforestation, both paper and cotton have a far higher environmental impacts – largely due to their extraction and production.

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So What Is The Simple Solution?

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Occam’s Razor would have us believing that the simplest solution is often the best one, and so it should be. High-profile anti-plastics campaigns are fantastic in getting people questioning the everyday objects we’ve become so accustomed to, and for making businesses and governments act. COVID has instigated a lot of change across the board, and the world of plastic and material consumption is no different. Here are some of the most holistic changes that movements such as going plastic-free are instigating:

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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

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It’s said that if you aim for the moon, you’ll fall among the stars and aiming for plastic-free is a crucial step in the right direction. Many of the drawbacks above focus on the lack of infrastructure equipped to deal with the recycling element of ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ effectively, making a focus on reduction and reuse all the more important.

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On-going investment into the UK’s recycling infrastructure and facilities will reduce both the upstream environmental impacts and the downstream problems of plastic pollution, creating a win-win. The proposed bottle deposit return scheme is a step in the right direction but we also need the capability to recycle more materials.

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Companies are increasingly looking to simplify the materials in their products and packaging, such as only using commonly used, single-plastic types that are easier to recycle. They need to use more genuinely sustainable alternatives (from a lifecycle perspective) to help develop the market for recycled materials. Many innovations such as new solutions for PET recycling by Unilever and Ioniqa are in development, and hopefully this focus and sense of urgency will provide more impetus to scale these up.

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