How to live without plastic

My parents used to have milk delivered this way when I was a child, and going to fetch the cold glass bottles that had been sitting out since 4am on the doorstep like drunks was thrilling, the milkman coming to the house in the night like Father Christmas. Milk floats still exist when you look for them — they’re just pimped-up vans rather than rattling 16mph mobility scooters. But going cold turkey with plastic isn’t easy. Our first attempt at a weekly shop is a disaster. Arthur has by now agreed reluctantly to ‘join in’ (like it’s an environmentally friendly party game) but we’re in Sainsbury’s for about half a day trying to work out what we can buy.

We walk around with an empty trolley and emptier stomachs ticking off everything we can’t have. Shreddies, no. Bread, no. Chicken, no. Rocket, no. Ground coffee — absolute nightmare — no. It’s the exact opposite of supermarket sweep. We give up and go for breakfast, which feels utterly like cheating and I swore I wasn’t even going to admit to it, but there you go. Farmers’ markets, we’ve decided, are the way forward.

At the risk of sounding like someone I never wanted to be, these markets really have the crème de la crème of produce. Plus, it’s like a plastic-free version of feeding the 5,000: there are options everywhere.

Suddenly we can buy fish wrapped in newspaper (romantic), meat and vegetables in brown paper bags and loaves of flour-dusted sourdough, which at £3 might be double the cost of Hovis, but taste twice as good to make up for it. It’s hard to do a budget shop when you’re surrounded by expensive morsels at markets, and we end up spending at least £20 more than we otherwise would on basic ingredients, but plastic-free is a lifestyle choice and at this point you’re deciding to let your wallet take more of a hit than the environment. There’s also the argument that you’re supporting small businesses, getting nicer, fresher ingredients (plastic allowing it to stay longer on the shelves in regular shops) and of course you get used to it.

By the second week, we’ve found the fruit and veg equivalent of a milkman: Abel & Cole, which delivers mixed cardboard boxes of seasonal fruit and veg all over England. Fruit comes in punnets instead of plastic as much as possible, while compostable bags made of veg starch stop carrots drying out then biodegrade in the garden afterwards. Some plastic is still used because spinach, for example, can’t survive a journey without it, but you can ask for a totally plastic-free box if you don’t mind giving up a few things.

They’ve also been getting a lot of calls from people interested in a plastic-free life and some staff members are upping the ante in their own homes. Ed Ayton, an assistant at the company, has been trying to cut plastic out of his life since moving to a new flat last year and has found some unexpected benefits.

‘Having to buy kitchen appliances threatened to derail the plans straight away,’ he says. ‘But it steered us towards second-hand items, for which our wallets were grateful. Now, buying things like toilet roll in seriously bulky quantities minimises plastic further and we can go a few weeks without single-use plastics crossing our threshold. We also find ourselves being thrifty with everything. It’s really opened my eyes to what you have to go without, but a little less consumption of everything can’t be a bad thing.’

By week three, Arthur is piously carrying a KeepCup to work himself and says half his office is, too, with some colleagues refusing to buy rounds for those without reusable cups. He’s also turning the lights off more at our flat ‘because of the turtles’ and chiding the neighbours for ramming our recycling bins with plastic, as well as ‘more Amazon parcels’ and glass. We are, I think, doing quite well. Lush is particularly good for cosmetics, so we’ve been able to swap normal bathroom stuff for non-plastic alternatives. Its ‘hard’ toothpaste, which looks like mint imperials and foams into normal-ish stuff when you chew and brush, also comes with mouthwash ‘mints’ for afterwards — these do come in containers made of plastic, but there’s much less of it than your usual toothpaste tube or mouthwash bottle.

Lush also makes blocks of shampoo, conditioner and deodorant, which are set like bars of soap and lather when wet. None has any plastic packaging, given they’re not a liquid when you get them. I’ve also started using a plastic-free perfume, Floral Street, from Harvey Nichols (the brand has done away with the plastic wrap) and found a refillable dry shampoo at Aveda, too. It’s kept in plastic, but you don’t have to throw it away.

The beauty industry is becoming conscious of plastic waste, with Neal’s Yard Remedies the first high-street shop to introduce refillable water stations — 30 stores this month with 12 in London including Notting Hill, Covent Garden and Wimbledon. And given how frequently we chuck away plastic bottles in gyms — they have an average lifespan of around 45 minutes — the fitness industry is following the plastic-free trend. 1Rebel’s gym on the South Bank is single-use plastic free, and its other studios are due to follow.

In some ways there is still a long way to go for the consumer, with some things simply unavailable any other way. I need to buy a coffee grinder and pick up beans before I can make coffee at home again in a cafetière, given that the industry hasn’t yet found a way to keep it fresh without plastic packaging in shops, and I’ve given up sparkling water.

Make-up is a huge issue, with everything from mascara to blusher coming in plastic containers; themselves wrapped in a shell of plastic on the store shelves. But I wouldn’t change the past month.

I’m about as far from a hippy as you can get, so the idea of going plastic-free for environmental reasons sounded to me at first like something to undertake in a commune in vegan shoes. But some of it, like giving up plastic straws, especially if you’re over the age of three, and carrying your own coffee cup is so simple that once you start, it quickly begins to feel irrational that you did anything else. ‘Think of the turtles,’ as we say in our house.

We haven’t decided yet to live like this all of the time, but we’re definitely more conscious about what we’re buying and throwing away and we’ve made some swaps that will stay. And to our next-door neighbours, if you’re reading this: you need to take a good, hard look at your bins.

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