My no-plastic life: I tried to cut out single-use items for a month – and it almost broke me | Plastics

The scale of plastic pollution is so terrifying, I mostly try to avoid thinking about it, but some facts stop me in my tracks. According to the UN Foundation, there is already enough plastic in the oceans to fill 5m shipping containers – and if production continues at its current rate, by the middle of this century there will be more plastic in the sea than fish. It is also indestructible – all the plastic ever made is still here, decomposing into microplastics that contaminate every corner of the planet – including our bodies. And it’s not just a case of somehow finding a way to “clean it up”. “Plastic pollution is now altering some major processes at the scale of the entire Earth system,” the Stockholm Resilience Centre reported, chillingly, in November.

In the UK alone, our plastic waste problem is mindblowing: in its 2024 Big Plastic Count, Everyday Plastic got almost 225,000 people to count their plastic waste for a week; the final tally was over 4.6m pieces.

Is there anything individuals can do about a problem on this scale? I’m pessimistic, but my editor wants me to give it a try: she challenges me to eliminate single-use plastic (SUP) for a month. Uneasily, I agree.

Week 1
Single-use plastic is all the stuff that you use once, then throw away or recycle, from moisturiser tubes to milk cartons. Starting out, I complacently believe I don’t consume that much of it. I already use York’s “weigh and pay” store, the Bishy Weigh, for refills of cleaning products, laundry stuff, shower gel, nuts and pulses; I buy bread, milk and vegetables at the market, get a veg box delivered, and have a cupboard full of plastic containers I reuse until they fall apart. Having the time and money to do that is a privilege – and living in a city with lots of similarly privileged folk means those resources are available. I’m lucky.

Even so, going through my house and tallying up the SUP reveals piles of it, from the bathroom to my office and worst of all, the fridge-freezer. It’s packed with plastic: mostly sachets and pots with film lids. My supermarket shop includes salads, stir-fry veg, fruit, frozen peas, chips, fruit and crisps, all encased in protective plastic cocoons. According to Alison Colclough of Everyday Plastic, this tallies with the Big Plastic Count’s findings: “The two big hitters were soft plastic from snacks and soft plastic from fresh fruit and veg.”

Why is flexible plastic so ubiquitous? Because it’s engineered to be excellent at its job. “Flexible plastics save a lot of food waste,” says Mark Miodownik, professor of materials and society at UCL and founder of its Plastic Waste Innovation Hub. These wrappings are “managing the humidity inside the package, allowing water to pass through, but they’re also a barrier to oxygen, and oxygen ages food very quickly.”

Adam Herriott, from waste-prevention charity Wrap, agrees that food wrapping is sometimes better than food waste. However, a 2022 Wrap study found that for apples, bananas, broccoli, cucumber and potatoes, the impact of plastic packaging on shelf life was demonstrated to be minimal. What actually made a huge difference was refrigerating at 4C. Wrap is asking supermarkets to ban plastic wrapping for 21 grocery products and to sell them loose.

Appropriately inspired, I head to my nearest supermarket, M&S. Beyond tinned stuff, pickings are dismal: apart from onions, garlic and leeks, the only vegetables I find loose are two types of cabbage. Morrisons is much the same: some loose fruit, but almost all veg is wrapped. Waitrose does slightly better: we get cauliflower, broccoli, sprouts, carrots and mushrooms.

It’s quickly apparent in supermarkets how many aisles are off-limits – many of them entirely made up of bright, convenient, indestructible flexibles and films. Some 70% of UK food and drink is plastic wrapped – 51% of this unnecessarily so, according to one study.

Emerging with a trolley of tins and loose carrots, our weekly shop is cheaper than usual, but what’s for dinner? We add pasta, rice, lentils and oats at the zero-waste shop, but the real revelation is our local greengrocer, Millie’s, where there is far more unpackaged fruit and veg. Meals take plastic-free shape: oats and nuts for breakfast, homemade hummus with lunch when I can be bothered, or tinned soup and toast. Green stuff isn’t plentiful – and salad is basically impossible. When I was in Italy in November you could buy beautiful loose salad leaves in paper bags, I rant, boringly, to anyone who will listen. Dinner is as boring as I am: we cycle through baked potatoes and beans, brassica-based stir-fries and pasta and sauce – all fine, but not every night.

Sweet treats are easy – York is 90% artisanal bakeries – but it rapidly transpires that I’m dependent on my 6pm crisps for my mental equilibrium. I trial hummus with carrot sticks (dull), plain nuts (depressing) or bougie olives in tins (ruinously expensive). None of them scratches the itch.

I’m exasperated that teabags come in inner bags for “freshness”: I have open boxes that have done three house moves with me and they still taste fine (I know because I’m reduced to finishing them). Thankfully, before things get really unpleasant, I track down plastic-free teas (thank you, Clipper) in a local health food shop.

Week 2
Desperate for crisp-adjacent snacks, I get peanut crackers and something called “paprika twists” at the weigh-and-pay shop. The latter are dreadful: dusty, sad, with the barest memory of crunch. I eat them all anyway.

Is there actually any point to this exercise, I wonder, crispless and cross. “I’d say yes,” says Herriott. He explains that eliminating plastic is the first step towards stopping the global plastic mountain getting any bigger. Then, the waste-reduction hierarchy of reduce, reuse and recycle should kick in. “Most people default to recycling because that’s convenient,” he explains, and it’s true that I rely on the fact I can put hard plastics – all those tubs and pots – in my recycling to assuage my guilt, but it’s an imperfect solution. Breaking down plastics for recycling can increase their toxicity and much of the global north’s plastic waste ends up in poorer countries to be dealt with. With this in mind, while the flexible-plastics recycling bins outside supermarkets seem like a step forward, it’s worth remembering that they are limited in number, and also flexibles can only be “downcycled” (used, for example, to make bin bags) not “closed-loop” recycled (made back into food packaging). An investigation by Everyday Plastics last year placing trackers in waste in storefront containers cast doubt on the efficacy of this system, finding a proportion was being incinerated or exported. Herriott is emphatic it’s worth doing anyway: “Downcycling is necessary for things to happen,” he says, and recycling flexibles “shows recyclers this material is here.” Still, everyone agrees that using less is the best option, so I stagger on.

Crisps aren’t the only head-scratcher; I struggle with household stuff. I already get washing-up and laundry liquid refills, plus paper-packed bamboo loo and kitchen roll (a decent eco option, according to the Radio 4 consumer show Sliced Bread). The compostable dish sponges the Instagram algorithm (which swiftly cottons on to my new obsession) recommends are fine. But bathroom bits are trickier: good luck sourcing plastic-free ibuprofen. Shower gel and shampoo refills are widely available if you’re not fussy (I’m not) and I won’t run out of moisturiser this month (Ethique and the Body Shop offer good plastic-free options if I do, according to an Instagram reel from sustainability blogger Moral Fibres).

Dental stuff, though, is a nightmare. Toothpaste tablets in a glass jar are awful, like brushing your teeth with a Trebor mint. My normal floss comes in cardboard boxes, but inside, the roll is packed in a tiny plastic bag. I upgrade to a metal dispenser and silk floss and switch to bamboo-based interdental brushes (you remove and recycle bristles, compost the body); they’re fine, but a further expense. So are “recyclable” toothbrush heads, which need to be returned to the manufacturer for recycling. Researching, I realise they are recycled into walking sticks, not more toothbrush heads. The whole sector feels opaque and unsatisfactory: another “eco” toothbrush manufacturer I’m algorithmically advertised turns out not to have recycled any of its brushes yet because they haven’t reached “critical mass”.

My fail of the week: on a Sainsbury’s dash, my brain switches off entirely imagining my Friday night martini and I buy a bag of ice cubes. The shame.

Week 3
My weekly get-out-of-vitamin-jail card is salad in “home compostable” bioplastic bags in my Riverford veg box. Unfortunately, I discover UCL investigated home compostables in 2022 and the results were “just bad,” as Miodownik, who conducted the research, explains. Although these bioplastics compost under lab conditions, 60% of the study participants who attempted it at home failed. “It’s just not a good solution,” says Miodownik. I can’t bear to quit, but unable to guarantee my compost is up to scratch, I send the bags back to Riverford, which composts them itself (I check, and they confirm, sending me a photo of their compost heap).

To vary my brassicas ‘n’ beans diet, I peruse my freezer, unearthing berries from last summer and long-forgotten curries. Deprived of biscuity things and other treats, we bake apples (good) and roast our own nuts (meh, they’re no crisps). “It’s probably forcing you to eat a lot less processed foods,” says Herriott when we discuss the snack shortage, and I sanctimoniously tell him that, actually, I miss beansprouts and baby spinach. It’s true, but I miss big Hula Hoops more.

Carefully selected takeaways relieve the monotony: pizza works, and our local Korean serves bibimbap in cardboard boxes. Unfortunately, when I collect, I realise the bag I thought was paper is plastic, so that’s my fail of the week.

Week 4
Planning a day trip, I recall that in a German study where a small group kept diaries of their attempts to reduce their SUP use, commuting and travel was one of the most challenging areas. “You have to plan your trips differently,” Melanie Jaeger-Erben, who conducted the study, tells me. So I do, bringing my usual water bottle, but also a reusable coffee cup and snacks. My bag weighs a ton. Despite this, I end up adding to my plastic count, when the Lebanese treats I always pick up in London come in a box with a plastic window rather than their usual paper bag.

Back home, I’m struggling. I’m a vegan, so easy protein is usually tofu, which is now off limits. I consider, research, then abandon the idea of making my own: I can’t find soya beans that aren’t in plastic and the coagulant also comes in plastic sachets. Someone tells me chickpeas and lemon juice work as substitutes, but by this point, I’ve lost the will. I become a lunch nihilist, joylessly chomping jars of cold lentils, like a plastic-free Huel.

I’m guilted into another fail: I can’t bear our baby tortoise’s sulky face when presented with foraged dandelions, so treat him to the plastic-wrapped chicory he loves. He falls on it with unprecedented savagery.

Week 5
Trudging to the finish line, the one bright spot is the arrival of Two Farmers crisps in home-compostable bags; the catharsis of crunch returns to 6pm. Thinking guiltily of Miodownik’s research, I put the empties aside to compost in spring, when I vow to get our bin up to a high enough temperature for decomposition.

Despite all these efforts, my final box of plastic shame contains 20 items. It’s a combination of stuff beyond my control (boxes of matches bought online arriving plastic wrapped), medical necessity (ibuprofen, HRT), “lesser of two evils” rationalisations (I eat some tofu well past its best-before date) and the various other failures catalogued above.

I can achieve a low – not a no – plastic existence, but there’s a massive sacrifice of convenience and money. Online shopping is out (except for specialist sustainable suppliers) and so, more or less, is supermarket shopping. Busier people, especially those with caring responsibilities, will find that impossible. “A packed life leads to packed things,” as Jaeger-Erben puts it. Even experts struggle: Miodownik describes his “Jekyll and Hyde existence”: weekends thoughtfully buying loose produce at markets, but a midweek dash to feed his kids (“I’m rushing to the local shop and I am not questioning”). The waste minimisation team at St Nicks, a York-based environmental charity I’m a trustee of, tried a plastic-free month in 2021; waste and recycling manager Sam Taylor says the worst bit was “the amount of planning. You’re going around three or four places trying to get your basic staples.” She ate, she recalls, “a lot of risotto”.

I’m angry with supermarkets – stop wrapping oranges! – and with governments. Consumers won’t just choose to sacrifice their convenience; reducing plastic use needs to become the easy (arguably only) option. “I always say structures need to come first,” Jaeger-Erben says. Miodownik agrees. “If the government were to say, ‘No, sorry, the environment is more important than your choice,’ I think people would grumble for a couple of years then they’d just get used to it.”

There are two elements, Miodownik thinks, to effecting fundamental change: “government legislation and innovation”. He’s hopeful for “meta materials”: changing the structure of a polymer so it can do all the things that currently require three to nine different materials in plastics. That would make “closed loop” flexible-plastic recycling a reality: “This is really exciting work,” he says, but for it to be viable at scale, non-recyclable plastics need to be taxed more. Other research is exploring replacing SUP with seaweed derivatives and various natural fibres, but reducing use will always be a vital part of the solution.

Even so, I recognise the “deep ambivalence” participants in Jaeger-Erben’s study reported. “I avoided buying snacks, potato chips or my beloved coconut water, thus reducing single-use plastic consumption,” one said. “However, this is not a long-term option, as I already limit myself in other areas of life to reduce my ecological footprint (vegan, no flights, vacation travel only by train, no car, sharing of living space, mobility in the city only by bike, secondhand purchases whenever possible …). I’m not that virtuous, but I try hard to live low-carbon and trying to eliminate SUP is hard and boring – it fills me with a mutinous kind of, ‘Why me?’”

Why not me, though, since I can? The four loyalty cards I’ve mysteriously accumulated for the Bishy Weigh are filling fast and I’m a regular at the greengrocer now. Still, when the month ends, there’s no denying the guilty thrill of chucking a six-pack of Seabrook sea salted crisps into my shopping basket. My life isn’t packed, but my treats are.