Packaging-Free Shopping: Why the Past Needs to Inspire Our Future

Plastic: Convenience Vs. Catastrophe

We live in a world where everything we buy is unnecessarily preserved. Food veiled in plastic packaging is commonplace. Disposable coffee cups, takeaway boxes, straws and plastic cutlery. They’re so convenient that we have convinced ourselves that we need them. We have unwittingly become a nation of plastic addicts.

Yet we aren’t completely oblivious to the implications of single-use packaging. We know that ‘disposable’ doesn’t mean biodegradable, recyclable or reusable. It’s no secret that landfill is accumulating an alarming amount of this stuff at a startling rate. A staggering 300 million tonnes of plastic is produced every year, and half of it is single-use.

No less ‘hush hush’ is the fact that eight million tonnes of plastic is dumped in the oceans every year. Nor is the fact it’s poisoning and killing marine life. The BBC recently tackled the issue of marine pollution in Blue Planet II. Millions of viewers watched a whale mourning her dead calf. Its death was caused by chemical contamination from plastic.

We’re becoming increasingly aware of the environmental implications of single-use plastics. The majority of us ‘do our bit’ by putting out our recycling bins once a fortnight. But that alone isn’t enough.

Would it help if we start to imagine what a packaging-free way of life looks like? Perhaps that’s exactly what we need to start making some drastic plastic changes…