I Collected Plastic Waste for 1 Week – Everyday Plastic Survey

25 June 2020

I participated in the Everyday Plastic Survey in June 2020 and collected my plastic for a week. I found it useful to document the process throughout so I could identify where we could make changes as a household to reduce waste. The majority of our waste was related to food and a large percentage of that was soft plastic, which isn’t recyclable.

I like to think that I’m very aware of the waste my family generate on a daily basis but I have to admit my participation in the Everyday plastic survey quarantine second edition, was an eye opener.  It really does highlight how easy it is to buy things for convenience and not to think too much about the resulting plastic waste. 

I also include some key ways the Everyday Plastic Survey inspired me to reduce our plastic waste to help our earth and oceans. 

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Eco bricks

In 2019 I started making eco bricks which is the process of taking all of your plastic flexible packaging, cleaning it, cutting it into small pieces and packing it into plastic bottles of any shape and size until it is packed solid. These bricks have then been used to make walls, houses and other types of furniture in other countries mostly. It is a fantastic idea and essentially the bricks are used in a way similar to Lego. 

The main reason I stopped doing this is because it seemed difficult finding somewhere local to me (UK) that took them and then there’s no guarantee that whomever you gave them to would ensure they were used for this purpose. 

They could just end up in landfill anyway after you’ve wasted your valuable time cleaning it all and stuffing it in the bottles which I didn’t like the sound of. 

I did consider using them myself to build something and if I get some time I still may do this as I have a good 30 or so collected which could be glued together to make some outdoor furniture etc. 

Another reason I didn’t continue this process was because I felt like this wasn’t addressing the real issue of how much actually comes wrapped in plastic.  So when my sister sent me the link to apply for the Everyday Plastic survey; I was pleased because as this is just the sort of thing I needed to identify where we could make some changes and reduce our waste. 

History behind Everyday Plastic Survey

The creator of Everyday Plastic Survey Daniel Webb, who lives in Kent, England collected his plastic waste for an entire year which was approximately 4,500 individual pieces of plastic; from that he got his own plastic footprint and a much better idea of the National plastic problem. 

How Much Plastic Do We Produce Everyday

The Everyday Plastic survey is a great way of looking into how much plastic we produce everyday.

The first Everyday Plastic survey they did during quarantine showed that the average amount of plastic waste thrown away by participants was 88 pieces per week and 76% of this was plastic used to wrap, preserve or consume food and drink. Scaled up to a year and that’s 4,577 individual pieces of plastic per household! 

The idea behind the Everyday Plastic survey is to make people aware of changes they can make to reduce their plastic waste as a household/school etc and use the information recorded to encourage big companies to reduce their plastic and find alternative ways to package things for consumers. 

The first week between the 8th of June and 14th June I collected my households plastic waste every day and took photographs of how much there was for the Everyday Plastic Survey, see below: 

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday 

As you can probably see some days recording for the Everyday Plastic Survey are definitely worse than others. 

Tuesday for example we have our shopping delivered which unfortunately at the moment they won’t allow me to use my reusable bags for, due to the Covid 19 risk so I have to hold on to the plastic ones until the supermarkets begin to accept them back; of course they could just end up in landfill anyway if they’re concerned about the virus being passed on. 

Due to this I was concerned they wouldn’t even want them back, however I have found a shop on Instagram Rubbishreinvented which accepts donations of plastic bags for creating bags and wall decorations etc. They are located in South Wales too so I’m pleased to help out a business fairly local to me. 

On the Saturday we didn’t have very much plastic waste, despite us all being home it was my birthday weekend so we had treated ourselves to a delicious takeaway box from a local catering business called Scoffage which is entirely plant based and all of their trays are cardboard and therefore recyclable which is amazing!

Sunday we had another takeaway from a local restaurant called Green Olive which has lots of vegan dishes on the menu, their packaging wasn’t too bad consisting of some foil trays but they did include a polystyrene tray and two plastic takeaway trays. 

In normal circumstances we collect our yoghurt pots, trays and tetra pak cartons and take them to our local recycling centre as well as recycling glass, cardboard and tins for the kerbside collection; which usually means that not a lot of our waste ends up going in the bin so to speak.

However we were informed at this workshop that a percentage of plastic waste taken at the recycling centre can’t actually be recycled due to being placed in the incorrect bins or not being cleaned properly so it’s worth bearing this in mind if you do collect your plastic in this way. 

Getting the results

The second part of the survey was to join a zoom chat on the 16th June and sort out all of the plastic waste into categories and record the data on a form on the website. If you had any things like disposable nappies, plasters etc these would just be written down during the week and not held onto because of hygiene reasons. Fortunately, as I use cloth nappies and disposables made from plant based materials and not plastic I did not need to worry about this. 

Before I took part in the Everyday Plastic survey I did expect that most of our plastic waste would come from packaged snacks because although we love to eat healthily in our house we do also love our snacks! Wrappers from bars and crisps do make up 59% of our 136 weekly individual pieces of plastic waste; sadly these are not recyclable on the kerbside or at recycling centres.  41% was hard plastic and these are the bits we take to our local recycling centre. 

My households personal plastic footprint was revealed:

Our personal footprint was revealed by the Everyday Plastic Survey. We wasted 136 pieces of plastic waste, it we threw away the same amount each week we would throw away 7,091 pieces at the end of a year which is shocking!

So basically 59% of our waste wasn’t recyclable as it’s soft plastic. 7 from fruit and vegetables, 11 from snacks and 11 carrier bags. 

Fruit and vegetable waste

The advice from the Everyday Plastic Survey was to buy loose fruit and vegetables or local fruit and vegetable boxes to reduce waste. Cut out some snacks during the week, make your own etc and always take reusable bags to the supermarket. (I leave bags in my car and handbag for this purpose)

This is brilliant advice, our main issue is that we were getting fruit and vegetable boxes delivered when we took part in the Everyday Plastic Survey. We just eat approximately 20 bananas a week and other things as we do try to eat more healthily. The result of this was we still has plastic waste from the extra fruit and vegetables that we bought in addition to the box service.

Honesty Time

After a few months we had to stop our fruit and vegetable box delivery, in the interest of full disclosure. It just did not work out well for us because you just don’t get as much fruit and vegetables in these boxes for your money and our health was suffering.

I’m always continually reviewing this to see if in the future we are in a better situation financially and able to spend that little bit extra on fruit and vegetables. This is just not an area we can reduce waste in right now. I don’t take things like this lightly and I’m determined post pandemic to find a zero waste option for fruit and vegetables at an affordable price to reduce waste in this area as a family.

How Can You Reduce The Use Of Plastic In Everyday Life

Some of the easiest ways to reduce the use of plastic in everyday life:

• Avoid single use items such as takeaway drinks cups and plastic straws.
• If you are ordering food to takeaway see if they’ll let you bring your own containers.
• Buy as much as you can in bulk, dried goods in bulk is a great way to reduce waste.
• Buy snacks such as crisps in larger bags to reduce the waste.
• If you can, avoid convenience foods as they normally come with a lot of unnecessary packaging.

Snack and wrapper waste

The main ways to reduce waste from the snacks we eat would be to make our own snacks (which isn’t really an option for me right now due to lack of time) or to find alternatives in paper, I haven’t found much as yet but I intend on investigating more as there must be some snack bars out there in paper which are also vegan. 

The changes I have immediately implemented to reduce waste is buying sharing bags of crisps for me and my son when we’re home so it’s less waste overall and I’ve recently discovered andkeep (affiliate link) which is a Dorset online plastic free company which sells so many vegan, eco friendly products.

Such as cleaning drops which you can either use your own plastic/glass spray bottle with it or buy one of their plastic spray bottles and reuse it for life; only buying refills when needed.  I didn’t actually have any plastic waste from cleaning products the week I recorded my waste, however I feel this is something I can cut plastic waste out really easily so wanted to do this straight away. 

I was aiming to make use of a new bulk buying service a local plant based takeaway Scoffage has implemented; with pasta, rice, beans and pulses. However, due to the continual pandemic I have been unable to do this as yet.

Group Statistics

The group who took part in the Everyday Plastic Survey was 132 people over 58 households. 

The average weekly amount of plastic waste from our group was 121 pieces.  

Between us all they calculated 7,005 individual pieces of plastic waste, which if scaled up to a year would be a waste of 365,261 from our group.  They used this information to work out that if the rest of the UK wasted the same this would be 3.4 billion individual pieces of plastic waste each week and 190 billion each year!

Chances are this number would actually be much higher in reality because the 58 households who took part may actually waste a bit less than other households in the UK. Quite often people don’t think about how much plastic waste they product, let alone think about ways to reduce waste.

Daniel did mention that we didn’t have any plastic water bottles calculated into the group waste. 

• 66% of the waste was plastic used to package or contain food and drink. 
• 63% was soft and therefore not recyclable
• 38% was hard so recyclable but only 5% of the overall waste would be recyled in this country!

Categories for the plastic recorded

• Meat and fish products 136 pieces
• Wet wipes 197 pieces
• Fruit and vegetable packaging 541 pieces
• Snack packaging 844 pieces (our group loved snacks!) 1 in 10 of the plastic we collected was a snack wrapper of some sort. 

If our group implemented some of the changes the Everyday Plastic survey advised to reduce our plastic waste, we could have saved 553 pieces of waste that week if you scale that up to a year that’s 14.8 billion pieces of waste saved from going to landfill.  

If 25% of the UK also implemented these changes that would be 3.7 billion pieces every week saved from landfill. I think these statistics are really good because it gives you an idea of the difference that can be made if we spread the word and get ourselves, family and friends all making more environmentally conscious decisions when buying food and drink!

Final thoughts

In conclusion I’m glad that I took part in this because when you see the weeks worth of plastic waste laid out on the floor it is quite shocking and it makes you want to make some changes to reduce waste.

I felt like ours wouldn’t be too bad because of getting fruit and vegetable boxes but snacks, pasta, houmous, bread and freezer food mostly comes in plastic; not to mention parcels from EBay sellers quite often come in plastic envelopes. 

This blogger outlines easy swaps they’ve made and what they have left to do, to reduce waste, their plastic waste in particular.

The Everyday Plastic Survey really inspired me to find alternatives for everyday products and really reduce our plastic waste as a household.

I would recommend anyone interested in the Everyday Plastic survey to register interest on their website and if you’re able to donate to the cause, please do. It really helps them spread the message of what they do and find solutions for consumers and businesses trying to reduce waste. 

For more eco friendly ideas, please check out my picking the best natural deodorant or eco teeth cleaning routine. 

Is the Everyday Plastic Survey something you would be interested in? Let me know or ask me any questions about the Everyday Plastic Survey. Or even if you’d like to reduce your plastic waste but don’t know where to start. I will do my best to advise you.

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