Eco audit: buying containers that can be reused

We have a friend whose mum would never ‘throw away’ a jar, all year – because they were all needed for the annual jam making. Containers were not just for one use – they were for multiple. And preserving makes a virtue out of this.

So what do you do when you’re in the supermarket, doing your weekly shop? Do you make a point of choosing food in containers that can be reused? Does it matter?

I wrote earlier about recycling jars and cans.  It’s probably one of the easiest places to come in.  So point one: if you can recycle it, once you’ve used the contents, do so.  But it doesn’t have to stop there.  Yes, recycle, but you might find you can also do some reusing before that point.

You don’t need to read much Jamie Oliver to learn that a humble jam jar comes in handy for mixing up a dressing for a salad.  Or craft sites, to discover that you can use them for making lanterns.  Or keeping spare screws.  And so on.

When I was at university, and a few years beyond, it became popular to reuse glass jars to store kitchen ingredients in.  Nice jars can be good to look  at – and work just fine for seeing your ingredients too.  (This was also useful before the arrival of IKEA in our neck of the woods, and the ease of buying glass storage jars.)

In my teens, I had a bit of a thing about coloured glass.  Those wine glasses I brought back from Germany: they had coloured stems.  So I would hang on to blue glass bottles – because I loved the look of them.  I think we ended up inheriting the collection of our friends now in Italy, when they headed over there.

Ironically, as a parent, it can become trickier to recycle – if you have a small maker nearby, who is convinced something exciting can be made out of just about anything you are about to put in the recycling.  No cereal packet is safe, of course.  But there are also the plastic bottle tops from milk cartons, other bits of packaging that suggest buttons on a robot, and so on.

Packaging plus imagination is a combination I prefer to support – even if it has been to pass on some of the recycling to nursery for the inevitable junk models that come home.  (On the plus side, when you/they tire of them, or run out of window sill space, you’re bound to be able to recycle at least some of the model.)

Some of my other items – plastics, and others – have made it into the toy kitchen.  It’s easy to buy items for a toy kitchen – wooden or fabric if you want a sustainable material.  But you can also extend it when you get a small item of packaging that would be hard to recycle – but would add to the cooking and restaurant play.

Little cardboard packets that raisins came in.  Ditto for ‘sweetie sticks’ (aka the sweetie cigarettes of my youth. Except they can’t call them that any more.).  But also small plastic bottles that are just the right size for a dinky kitchen – and little hands.

It can also be fun to make new things out of packaging that would otherwise be ignored. Those cardboard boxes that internet purchases are delivered in  – they can find new uses. Fired by seeing homemade cardboard arcades online (Caine’s Arcade, that has become a hit around the internet), there was a certain degree of designing and building, post-Christmas.

We now have our own arcade game, complete with Lego Stormtroopers to guard the hole where the ball is meant to go in.  And the beginnings of a cardboard robot costume that isn’t quite finished.  (But it packs flat, at least, until it gets looked at again.)

Here lies the struggle.  It is cheaper to transport plastic than glass.  It is convenient to see through the packaging of what you buy – which you can’t do with cans or cardboard.

But given that, so far, only plastic bottles can be reliably recycled in most places of the UK, there is still masses more packaging to do something with.

How am I doing here? Not always so good.  I do have mesh bags that can take fruit and veg at supermarkets.  I don’t always remember to bring them with me.  And equally, it can be harder to buy loose items at supermarkets.

Those pre-bagged items – they are also to speed you up and get you through the checkout faster.  So more people can buy.  When I did more of my weekly shopping at our local Coop, they would see me coming – and ring to open another till.  Weighing fruit and veg takes time for the checkout person.

I’m trying to make a few shifts – one to buy a type of (well-liked) pudding in Tetra Pak rather than plastic, so I can recycle it.  To avoid buying items in lighter plastics which can’t be reused in the same way as sturdier ones, like margarine cartons.  (My freezer owes much to the stackability of margarine cartons.)

Given that further uses of packaging can be thought of, ad infinitum, I will finish here.  But I will tap myself on the shoulder when I do go food shopping – to see what I am putting into the trolley in the first place.