One bottle at a time...

Today is my first day of living for a month without plastic and two exciting things happened. First, I had a lovely delivery from Boobalou, a company that supplies reusable everythings from toothbrushes, to kitchen roll to baby bowls. I admit that when I was a new mother, if I'd met someone who had her shit together enough that she could actually think beyond the next breastfeed to the state of the oceans and how to save them and therefore fed her baby with bamboo cutlery, then I probably would have slapped her one. However, I am less exhausted than I was back then and thus less prone to violence, so I'm now kind of in favour of the bamboo baby in reusable nappies. (I tried reusable nappies on my daughter. I lasted about a month.)

These are the contents of the package: reusable foodwrap, a bamboo toothbrush, reusable sandwich bag, bamboo cotton buds and some very dubious-looking clay-based toothpaste designed for people who live in the forest and bring up their children by a mountain stream. But never mind about that.

The other thing that happened was this. I wear make-up. Quite a lot of make-up. I like make-up. I look better in make-up than I do bare-faced. It is an act of altruism not to inflict my bare face upon the small town where I live. Anyway, I have not been able to source make-up that doesn't come in plastic packaging (though I'm sure it must exist), so after I got ready this morning, I wrote letters to Clinique and Boots and asked them to tell me their long-term plans for reducing their plastic packaging and also asked when they plan to implement a refill programme, which would allow their customers to buy only one container for each product and return it to be refilled when they've finished with it. This is how shops used to work, in the olden days before plastic. It was life. People coped with it. People would cope with it again because the great thing about people is  that they get used to stuff.

So anyway, then I decided to write to Waitrose because the reality of the plastics crisis is that it was caused by and can therefore be repaired by supermarkets. Supermarkets wrap absolutely everything in plastic. I wish they would stop doing this. If enough people tell them to stop doing this because the world will end if they don't, then they will probably stop doing this.

In the meantime, however, we need to go local. In Oxford, there exists a Community Refill Programme. It is run by two young women who source huge bags of foodstuffs and household cleaning products and operate from the farmers' market. Customers take their containers on a Saturday, have them refilled, and a little less plastic ends up in the sea. Magic.

So I emailed the two young women and asked how they did it because I'd like to set this up in Hexham, where I live. They have invited me to Oxford to see how it's done and have even offered accommodation so I can (a) visit their pop-up shop and (b) talk for a long time about how to do it.

So that's what I'm going to do. A Community Refill Programme is on its way to Hexham. Don't wet your pants with excitement now, but watch this space...