Zero Waste Week In Progress: The Supermarket Shop

On Day 1 of Zero Waste Week I did some shopping in our local market town, which went quite well. Today, I went to Lidl to do a bigger shop. I didn’t buy any pre-packed fresh meat, fresh fish, cooked meat or cheese. I’ll go to the butcher’s in town with my roll of greaseproof paper tomorrow for that shopping. However, I did buy cereal, fresh fruit and vegetables, some food for the freezer, tinned tomatoes and tinned baked beans, sparkling water, milk, butter, eggs and bicarb of soda.

The fruit and vegetables transferred from plastic to my own paper bags

I will reuse the plastic bags inside the cereal boxes for proving homemade bread and recycle the boxes.
I bought loose fruit and vegetables where possible, placing them in brown paper bags I brought from home. Plums, broccoli and mushrooms were all in plastic packaging. I removed the packaging, placed the fruit and vegetables in my brown paper bags and took the plastic to the till so that the cashier could beep the barcode and then dispose of the plastic for me. The thought crossed my mind that if we all returned our plastic packaging to the supermarket for them to deal with and they paid a higher tax to dispose of plastic packaging, they would most likely use more environmentally friendly packaging in the first place.
The freezer food was all in cardboard boxes, which will be recycled, with either no plastic or minimal plastic inside the boxes.
The egg boxes will be recycled or passed on to school for craft projects along with toilet roll and kitchen roll inners.
Food tins will be recycled.
Bottles from the sparkling water will be reused by my husband when he is out running.

So, the only plastic items that will go in the recycling are the milk containers and the only waste that will go in the bin is the lid from the bicarb of soda, the butter wrappers and the individual wrappers inside the box of ice creams for the children. Not bad.

The cat is a big fan of cloth shopping bags too. He's an eco-friendly cat! — The cat is a big fan of cloth shopping bags too. He’s an eco-friendly cat!

I’ll be blogging one more time about Zero Waste Week on Sunday, the last day, when I’ll be musing over whether this effort is sustainable in the long term and how much of an impact Zero Waste Week has.