This post was most recently updated on March 18th, 2020
This is the year of reducing our plastic consumption. I plan on asking our families to avoid giving us or the kids plastic for birthdays/Christmas too.
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Instead, we have asked the family to give them experiences – movie tickets, a trip to the beach, a picnic somewhere fun or lessons for a term for something we can’t afford.
The kids are on board too. My girls are bird crazy, to say the least, earlier in the year as part of our science for homeschool we watched a few videos on the effect of plastic on the environment.
It really hit home to the girls all the birds dying from eating plastic. If you haven’t watched it yourself now is your chance. *Warning: they are a bit gross*
Today we attempted the groceries without plastic. And failed. BUT we did use a whole lot less plastic than we usually do.
We also avoided the supermarket and chose to shop at the greengrocer, butcher and bulk bin shop. Surprisingly the butcher was much cheaper than I expected, not as cheap as the budget on special stuff at the supermarket, but certainly not bad.
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However I did forget to take some containers, but I am not super mum, I forget lots. I also forgot to take pencils and paper to the kid’s costume design meetup this morning.
While I was at the butcher I also bought a 5kg block of dripping to fry our eggs and pretty much everything in. *win*
I have ordered some bane marie pans with lids to use for stacking meat and leftovers in the fridge. I chose the 1/6 size in both 65mm and 100mm depth.
I will let you know how I get on with these as storage vessels. I like the idea of them as they stack and are easy to clean. UPDATE: They are fantastic to use in the fridge and freezer!
The greengrocer we go to is known for cheap veggies, but sometimes you have to be picky about what you buy as they can be pretty close to their use-by time.
Today’s haul was pretty good though, and they had bananas on special which when my crazy boy has 3-4 a day at the moment we go through HEAPS! Some of the plastic we got today was from the fruit and veggie bags.
But I have ordered some cotton mesh bags to replace the plastic fruit/veggie ones. I can’t wait for them to arrive! Single use plastic is my least favourite sort.
Then after splashing out on some wasteful but secretly delicious takeaways (again, I ain’t perfect!), we took on the bulk bin store armed with a cardboard box full of my nicely labelled jars.
The ladies were lovely and they weighed each jar and wrote it’s weight on its bottom with a marker. Unfortunately, their trolleys don’t have a toddler seat, and my little troll *cough* I mean darling was nap-less and cranky and INTO EVERYTHING.
I put him in the bottom of the trolley, and he promptly stood up and proceeded to try and spill everything he could get his sticky little mitts on.
It was super stressful, like I-nearly-gave-up stressful. My girls were amazing, though they kept trying to get me to buy things for their pet birds. They don’t have pet birds…
So lessons learned on my first day Plastic Free Shopping
1) Take a pushchair to strap the crazy toddler in, and do it up tight.
2) Remember to take containers to the butcher.
3) I spend a lot less on crap we don’t need when I am not wandering the aisles in the supermarket!
4) I forgot to get butter. Turns out I will still need the supermarket for some things.
Please follow our journey into living with less plastic. How do you reduce your plastic usage? Let me know in the comments below!
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