No plastic packaging challenge - six months in

It's now half way through the year (yes! already!) so I thought this would be a good time to give an update about my pledge of going a year without plastic food packaging.

One of the best parts of the week - our veggie box arrives!

To quickly recap, I wanted to cut down the amount of landfill I was generating just by eating food that comes in plastic packaging.  One day late last year I had scoffed down a quick takeaway lunch (as you do) and was about to throw the plastic container in the bin when it occurred to me that that plastic container, which took a heck of a lot of resources to produce and which would be around for eons to come, was actually used for about 10 minutes.

Image from here

So how am I going with my challenge?  Generally I would say pretty good.  It certainly helps that we are members of a veggie co-op so a large amount of our food is bought in bulk (in cardboard boxes) and shared between a number of households.  We also have a refill co-op shop (the kind where you fill up your own containers with grains, pastas etc) close by, which also helps.

We take our own reuseable bags and containers with us everywhere, which can be a pain, but it's easy to be caught out.  We've found we have to be hyper-aware when we are shopping, because food manufacturers will sneakily use lots more packaging than needed, and it's common to find plastic wrapping inside a cardboard box when it is totally unnecessary.

Things we are doing differently:
- Eating butter instead of margarine
- Baking our own bread
- Making our own yoghurt
- Buying other dairy in glass containers or other packaging
- Taking our own containers when we get takeaway meals (some restaurants will look at us funny, but they will still fill them up for us)
- Asking for my takeaway sushi in paper bag and refusing the little plastic soy sauce fish
- Having a go at making our own whenever possible - pizza bases, pastry... whatever else - we'll give it a try!

Elgaar dairy comes in glass containers, and you get a refund when you return them

Food that I miss:
- Marshmallows
- Packets of chips (crisps)
- Mexican burrito and tortilla wraps - I tried making my own, but haven't really got the hang of it yet
- Puff pastry

We're not perfect and there are still small bits of plastic packaging that sneak into our house, and I've mentioned before that travelling for work makes the pledge extra tricky (especially aeroplane meals!).  But we're definitely reducing the amount of landfill that comes out of our house, and as long as we continue to be aware of packaging and try to reduce it, I think that's the main thing.