Suffering from sweaty, itchy bits ?
Try this tropical talc in metal tins.
It soothes and calms and leaves no plastic behind
So far I have seen it in Loas and Thailand in a range of shops including 7-11s.
Chop Sticks Folding
The curse of the plastic chopstick wrapper means that eating plastic-free South East Asian style can be hard work. So too can carrying full size chopsticks – they are too long and pointy for comfort. So it’s a big cheer for the clever Chinese for these push and click “folding” chopsticks.
Open them up slide them together and they are full size sticks. Pull them apart and seal them in the handy carrying pouch and they are easily transportable little things of beauty. Made of stainless steel and wood they look and feel good.
They are also great for taking to places closer to home where they give you those disposable chopsticks.
We got ours in Beijing but you can of course get them on Amazon.
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| Lifeventure Knife, Fork, Spoon Folding Cutl… | Travel Stainless Steel Foldable Pocket Chop… |
Being committed to local shopping I prefer to buy that way whenever possible. I would encourage you to do the same. One of the joys of living plastic free is mooching round the local shops seeing what you can source.
If you can’t buy local, please do check the links in the posts. They link direct to the suppliers. Do consider buying from them and support their online businesses.
If you can’t do that then I have put together and Amazon catalogue. Yes I know…
Amazon is a very dirty word at the moment and I thought long and hard before suggesting them. Heres why I went ahead….. No we are not entirely happy with Amazons recent history. However these links are for 3rd party sellers, we have always found the Amazon service to be good and their packaging usually compostable. In the absence of anything else we feel we can recommend them.
If you buy a product via this link we do get an affiliation fee for this. That’s not why we do it.
More
Also useful is folding cutlery and tiffin tins. Here’s the rest of our plastic free travel kit
Music & C.Ds
I have just finished down loading all my CDs on to an external hard drive. From now on I will only download music. Or listen to the radio.
I gave all my old C.D.s away. But if I could crochet I could have made mandalas. You can find a whole range of C.D. related crafts up on my Pinterest page.
If I was an artist I could have done this.
French artist Elise Morin and architect Clémence Eliard just unveiled a shimmering art installation made from 65,000 discarded CDs at the Halle d’Aubervilliers of Paris’s Centquatre.
Cups BYO
Any one lucky enough to see the photos of Vladimir Putin bare-chested in camo will have some idea just how butch the Russians can be. A fact reinforced by the number of camping shops in Moscow selling rugged man’s stuff. And they don’t get much more rugged than this tin cup, double wall construction and complete with sturdy clip to attach it to your rucksack. So I got one.
I take a reusable cup travelling with me because I am highly dependant on take out. I don’t want to use plastic cups and so-called paper cups are plastic lined so I take my own cup and use that instead.
I have to say, as reusable cups go, this one is as good as Vlad on horseback – and you can’t get better than that!
But reusable cups are not just for travellers.
A report conducted jointly by the Alliance for Environmental Innovation and Starbucks found that 1.9 billion cups were used by Starbucks in 2000.[5] In 2006, Starbucks reported that this figure had grown to 2.3 billion cups for use at their stores.[6]
And just recently the Guardian reported that “A conservative estimate puts the number of paper cups handed out by coffee shops in the UK at 3bn, more than 8m a day with only one in 400 is being recycled.
You can read more about disposable cups here
Good enough reasons to take your own reusable cup to the coffee shop.
Buy
I don’t know if you can buy such a good cup in the effeminate, decadent West but you will find something in outdoor shops that might do. Most do a good range of camping cups.
More Options
I have not used these myself so I cannot say how well they perform or what the onward packaging is like. You will have to check with the suppliers. Any one who has tried them, can review them or can recommend some other great product please do leave a comment. Together we can make changes.
Some of the products featured may come plastic packed or even be made of plastic. They are included because if a product reduces the consumption of plastic disposables or packaging waste then, we feel, there is a strong justification for using it. You read more about using plastic to cut plastic here.
Reusable silicon cups with lid
They wont break in your bag and will save the planet – result. You can buy them from Onya – the people who do the mesh produce bags.
Heres some blurb from them
Did you know you can take your own reusable coffee cup to most coffee shops? They will fill it instead of the usual disposable one and some of them even offer you a discount! 
Features:
• Foodgrade silicone cup/lid
• Eco friendly and reusable
• Dishwasher safe
• Withstands up to 200ºC heat
• Cool to the touch
• byocup and lids are not available separately.
The byocup silicone story
We are conscious of the fact that manufacturing reusable cups also has an environmental impact, so we have put a process in place to recycle the cup responsibly.
At the end of its life as a byocup, please return it to us and we will forward it to a silicone recycler in India who will turn it into charity bracelets or key rings.
Ceramic Cup
If you don’t like the sound of that or prefer something ceramic try the I am not a paper cup – a pottery cup with reusable silicon lid.
I know it looks like a polystyrene version but thats the joke. It’s also double wall construction so it will keep your drink hot and your hands cool. Shame about the plastic packaging! You can buy them here.
Catalogue
Being committed to local shopping, I prefer to buy that way whenever possible. I would encourage you to do the same. One of the joys of living plastic free is mooching round the local shops seeing what you can source. Coffee Evolution were doing take away ceramic cups for instance.
If you can’t buy local, please do check the links above. They look direct to the suppliers. Do consider buying from them and support their online businesses.
If you can’t do that then I have put together and Amazon catalogue. Yes I know…
Amazon is a very dirty word at the moment and I thought long and hard before suggesting them. Heres why I went ahead….. No we are not entirely happy with Amazons recent history. However, we have always found their service to be good and their packaging usually compostable.
If you buy a product via this link we do get an affiliation fee for this. That’s not why we do it.
Transiberian Express
For those of you planning to go overland through Russia this year, here are some plastic free tips. If you are going by train you will of course be travelling on what is known as the trans Siberian. This is not, as I first thought, the name of a particular type of train like the Orient Express. It refers to a net work of railway lines traversed by a multitude of trains. These trains are of differing ages, standards and facilities which is reflected in the price of the journey. We traveled on a number of different trains but always the cheapest which means grottiest and always top bunk Koupe class.
Koupe class means there are four bunks to a cabin. They are fixed in place so you can lie on your bunk at any time. The top bunk is cheaper than the bottom because the views out are limited. And you might find yourself perched up there quite a lot of the time. In most of our trains the bottom folk wanted to stretch out most of the time which meant we were pretty much consigned to sitting on our bed or spending time in the restaurant car.
I have heard the better class of trains have showers – none of ours did. On our trains there were two toilets per coach (and this goes for first class too), which were extremely old, battered and ugly but clean enough. That’s on a not- too- picky scale. In the toilet cubicle was a small sink with no plug.
The food in the restaurant car looked and smelt appalling. It was served wherever possible using disposable plastic products, and all the condiments came in plastic sachets. Even the first class tour group got their prison slop doled out in plastic bowls. They were not best pleased. Some tickets include food which means your meals are sent out to you from the restaurant car in polystyrene boxes. From what we saw going out in those clam shells I would not recommend this option.
All drinks came in plastic bottles except beer which came in glass and juice in tetra paks. Hot water was available in unlimited quantities from the boiler at the end of each carriage. Glass cups with handles were available from the stewardess for making drinks in. They may also sell you tea bags and sachets of coffee and powdered milk. everything
The amount of waste each train produced was frightening. At certain stops they would empty the train of sackfulls of garbage and guess what? Yup all plastic. They had to have a mini tractor to tow it off down the platform.
So what can be done to make this train ride as plastic free as possible.
Plastic Free Journey
Firstly, and I would recommend this for all train users not just the plastic free kind, don’t eat in the restaurant. Thankfully the train does stop some times for as long as 45 minutes and at each stop there are opportunities for stocking up. Often, though not always, there will be an army of women waiting to sell you home cooked things ranging from the humble boiled egg to the extremely strange deep-fried, meat-filled doughnut. For these you will need some kind of moisture proof bag so come prepared with your own supply of bio bags (corn starch bags – made from vegetables they are fully compostable.
Most station do have shops but the food they sell is pretty much all plastic packed. You can buy the spreadable cheese triangles wrapped in foil and packed in cardboard boxes. Occasionally there will be unwrapped bread and there is usually a poor selection of expensive fruit.
For drinks we mainly made do with green tea made with hot water from the boiler or cold water made with cooled down hot water from the boiler.
We bought some food on board with us though not nearly enough. Next time I do this I will load up with fruit.
Plastic we used on board
Several large Coks.
To sit in the restaurant car we had to buy something. Though it would have been culturally acceptable, it was physically impossible for us to start drinking beer in the early morning, so we bought juice. It came in a plastic lined cardboard carton and was called Cok. How my fellow travellers laughed.
“Give me large Cok” they would ask smothering giggles.
“Do you want some Cok?” they would offer chortling away.
“I love Cok”, was a side splitter every time.
Yes they were boys.
When we tired of Cok (fenur fenur) we would occasionally have beer with plastic lined caps
3 tins of olives.
Two paper wrapped packets of crackers though almost certainly plastic lined paper.
One packet of green tea with plastic wrapper.
Want to find more travel related plastic free tips? Check out the travel category
Stay at home type? Check out my range of Uk based plastic free products with the >>>A-Z<<< plastic free index
Related articles
- Clever Baggers (plasticisrubbish.wordpress.com)
How to buy food plastic free
If you want to shop plastic-free then you need to take your own packaging. Seems like a lot of bother? Well, here are some reasons why you might wish to consider this option:
You don’t like that hormone inhibitors and toxic chemicals can leach from plastic packaging into your food,
You hate plastic pollution,
You love being zero waste
You find a place that sells your required product unwrapped. This can be anywhere from your local butcher to the cheese counter at Morrisons.
You take your own packaging and ask them use that. Bit embarrassing at first but stick with it – I do it everywhere.
Reusables 
PRODUCE BAG
These are reusable bags that can be used instead of the plastic bags supplied by shops. Use them for veges, and anything else loose and dry,
I use a cotton or net produce bags.
Find out more about
synthetic mesh bags
organic cotton produce bags
TUBS
For meat, fish and other stuff I try to use a reusable plastic tub whenever can.Which means I take my own tub to the butchers and ask them to use that. I use a plastic tub because it is water proof, lightweight, I have had it for ages and there is lots of wear in it yet.
If you are worried about chemical leaching you might not want to use plastic tubs. As you know if you wash plastic at hot enough temperatures to clean the container properly, it is more likely to leach chemicals. And that plastic leaches more chemicals as it ages.
If this worries you can get metal or glass dishes. Glass is heavy so I would recommend metal dishes.
And some times, it doesn’t matter what I take, I get refusals. Supermarkets especially are not keen on this and will argue long and hard. Even some local butchers will refuse., in which case I use…..
Disposables
The following products are certified compostable and I compost them at home in my bin once I have done with them. They can also be safely burnt.
For meat and fish I use bio plastic (corn starch bags – made from vegetables)
For cheese and such like its old school paper bags.
At the deli counter where I get humus, pate and the rest, I use these compostable PLA pots.
More
Though I recommend finding reuses for your disposable packaging, (for example using the bio bags to line your compost bin),they are of course disposable. This might not sound like the greenest option but it is still a whole load better than plastic.
Compostable?
What is compostable? To be classed compostable, items must biodegrade within a certain time (around the rate at which paper biodegrades), and the resulting biomass must be free of toxins, able to sustain plant life and be used as an organic fertilizer or soil additive. For a man-made product to be sold as compostable, it has to meet certain standards. One such is the European Norm EN13432. You can find out more here.
Taking it home
Carry your shopping home in a reusable carrier bag – natch!
My bags of choice are those old granny favourites, string bags.
I also have some tiny fold up carrier bags which come in very handy.
More
Though I recommend finding reuses for your disposable packaging, (for example using the bio bags to line your compost bin),they are of course disposable. This might not sound like the greenest option but it is still a whole load better than plastic.
I compost all this packaging in my own compost bin. Yes even the cornstarch plastic bags and pots.
Loose Food A to Z
Find out if a shop near you sells bulk food loose. This is stuff that that normally comes plastic packaged ie rice, pasta and salt. And yes these shops do exist in the U.K. There’s just not many of them. Heres a list of towns with shops selling loose food, organised alphabetically.
Buy Packaging
Being committed to local shopping, I prefer to buy that way whenever possible. I would encourage you to do the same. One of the joys of living plastic free is mooching round the local shops seeing what you can source. If you can’t buy local please do check the links above to the suppliers and buy direct from them and support their online businesses.
Chris Woodford talks to PIR….
This month we are upping the bar with an article that’s well written and wildly informative. Yes we have a guest post……
While trawling through the internet I stumbled across the fantastic website www.explainthatstuff.com written by Chris Woodford. It is all more than good but there was an article on plastic so pleasing that I had to ask if I could reproduce it. Didn’t I just fall off my chair with excitement when he offered to write something for the blog? So I thought I would ask all the questions that troubled me about plastic and see what he thought.
But before we begin… let me introduce the man:
Chris Woodford is a British science writer. He has an MA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University and specialized in physics (he studied at the Cavendish Laboratory) and experimental psychology. Other skills include chemistry, crystallography, materials science, and math. He had his first magazine article published in 1980 and he went on to write, amongst others, the( best-selling), how-it-works books
Cool Stuff 2.0 (The Gadget Book), and Cool Stuff Exploded (all published worldwide by Dorling Kindersley/DK).
Now onto the questions and the first seems kind of easy but I had never really considered it before the boycott.
What is plastic anyway?
The first thing to note is there’s no such thing as “plastic”; it’s not one thing, it’s many. Plastics are many different kinds of synthetic chemicals. What they have in common is that they’re polymers. They’re mostly made of carbon and hydrogen atoms linked into basic building blocks (molecules), which then repeat themselves over and over again. That’s what a polymer is: a molecule that repeats itself. A polymer looks like a coal train made of dozens of identical trucks all joined together, often in long chains. Each identical truck is one molecule and it’s joined to similar trucks on either side.
Is there anything remotely good about plastics?
Absolutely! The clue’s in the name, really. Plastic means “nasty stuff you can’t get rid of”, but it also means flexible–and that’s the good thing about plastics. They can do all kinds of useful things for us. From the moment you’re jolted awake by a plastic alarm clock, to the moment you brush your teeth with a nylon toothbrush and get back in bed again, plastic fills your every waking moment. I’m wearing a polyester fleece right now made from old plastic bottles, typing on a plastic computer keyboard, listening to music through plastic headphones and thinking occasionally about the dirty breakfast dishes sitting in the plastic washing-up bowl.
So what’s the downside?
Everything that’s good about plastic has a downside. There are dozens of different kinds of plastics, which is great if you’re a product manufacturer and you need to find something that does a very specific job. You use quite different plastics to make water bottles and milk bottles, for example, and plastic bags are made from something different again. That’s not so good if you’re a local council with the job of collecting plastics and trying to recycle them, because they pretty much all have to be recycled in different ways. Plastics are very cheap, which means we can use them for virtually anything. But the drawback there is that we now rely far too much on disposable things that benefit no-one except the people who make and sell them. And because plastics are essentially synthetic chemicals–ones we’ve dreamed up in laboratories–there aren’t really natural mechanisms that break them down. Animals and insects don’t eat plastics. Those long chains of molecules just sit there. And they go on sitting there–potentially for hundreds of years.
Hundreds of years?!
Hundreds of years! A plastic bottle can take 500 years to break down. That’s not a timescale we can readily appreciate. A human might live 80 years, so a plastic bottle lives six times longer. Or we could think of it in a completely different way. Imagine you come across an old plastic bottle someone’s thrown into your front garden. Now if plastic lasts 500 years, that bottle could have been thrown there by King Henry VIII
Image via Wikipedia
on his way back from the pub! It could be older than everything in your street–all the trees, the houses, the cars, the people… everything. Now of course that’s not actually true because plastics weren’t invented in 1511. But roll the clock forward five hundred years from now, to 2511, and it’s quite possible that the person living in what’s now your house will dig up the garden and find bits of plastic you left behind. Or that a 25th-century Tony Robinson will make archaeology programmes on TV about sifting through all the random bits of plastic in a 21st-century landfill.
But we’re recycling so much more plastic now?
Or are we? Over 90 percent of the plastic stuff we buy still ends up in a landfill. That’s bad for all kinds of reasons. Landfill is just a more polite word for litter; it’s litter on a grand scale! Not only that, it’s such a waste. Most plastic comes from petroleum–and we know oil is going to run out sooner or later. Apparently, something like 200,000 barrels of oil a day are used to make plastic for packaging, just in the USA–a huge waste, and most of it going to landfill in a matter of days or weeks. There’s also the question of energy. It takes far more energy to make disposable plastic things than it does to use the same things over and over again. Recycled plastic is much better than brand new plastic: it saves about two thirds of the energy used in manufacturing. But, quite frankly, recycling is only a little bit better than throwing things away. It’s far better not to use plastic at all than to recycle it. It’s much better, for example, to have a reuseable aluminium water bottle that you fill up from the tap each day than to buy plastic bottles of water and then very conscientiously recycle them. Where do they go after you’ve recycled them? It takes a lot of energy to transport them, melt them down, and turn them into new plastic products that may (or may not) be recycled. Far better to eliminate the plastic completely if you can.
Do plastics have to be so bad for the environment?
Absolutely not. The thing to remember about plastics is that humans created them. Chemists in laboratories engineered pretty much all these polymers and designed them to do very specific jobs. There’s nothing random or accidental about it, so why should there be anything random or accidental about how we dispose of them? In other words, there’s no reason why chemists can’t engineer plastics that can be disposed of more easily. In fact, they’re already doing just that. We’ve had biodegradable plastics for several decades and now the industry buzzword is “bioplastics”: plastics made from more natural ingredients that break down much faster when we dispose of them.
That sounds brilliant! How do they work?
A really good example is the kind of packaging you now find on many sandwich containers. Go back ten or twenty years and take-away sandwiches always came in plastic triangles that you simply threw away. Who knows what happened to them? Well most of them–hundreds of millions of them–are sitting in landfills under our feet. What a waste! And what a disgrace! Buy yourself some sandwiches today and it’s a very different story. You’re probably going to get a cardboard container (which is easy to compost or recycle) with a thin window made of what looks like ordinary, thin plastic. But it’s more likely to be a bioplastic based on corn starch (the stuff you put in sauces to thicken them up). The bioplastic has these little chunks of cornstarch embedded in it. As it picks up moisture, the starch swells up (just like your sauce thickens) and cracks the plastic into tiny fragments that break down more quickly–typically in just a few months. Things like greetings cards are now being packed in the same stuff. Other bioplastics (ones that don’t use cornstarch) are designed to be broken down by sunlight, water, or high temperatures.
Does bioplastics have any drawbacks?
It would be great if all the plastic we couldn’t avoid using was either reused in some way or recycled. Realistically, though, that’s never going to happen: most bioplastic is going to end up in a landfill, just like ordinary plastic. So we still need to think about that very carefully. Some bioplastics disappear very cleanly in landfills. Because they’re made from plants, they absorbed carbon dioxide when they grew in the first place and they release that carbon dioxide again when they break down–so effectively, ignoring the energy used in manufacturing, they’re carbon neutral: they don’t add to global warming. Other bioplastics break down and release methane, which is a really powerful greenhouse gas (much worse than carbon dioxide). That’s a serious issue. Some also leave a toxic residue in the landfill, which could cause water pollution or soil contamination. Another problem is that bioplastics can’t be recycled the same way as ordinary plastics so if they all get mixed in together in a recycling container, you can end up with a huge pile of unprocessable waste that has to go to a landfill. There are other issues too. Some bioplastics are described as “compostable”, but they only compost in the kind of high-temperature digesters operated by councils, not on your average, low-temperature, home compost heap.
So not really a complete solution?
Definitely not. You have to go back to what we were saying right at the beginning–about how many different kinds of plastic we use and in how many different ways. You can’t really make a plastic washing up bowl from bioplastic–it would slowly disintegrate before your eyes! But what else are you going to make it out of? And if you accept that it’s not something you’re going to keep forever, what happens to it when you throw it away? Ditto with a toothbrush: it’s something you have to throw away and replace (if you want to keep your teeth).
What’s the answer to that?
The way to look at these things is always reduce, reuse, recycle–in that order. So you first have to ask do I really need a plastic washing-up bowl? Can I wash up in the sink, which is what people always used to do until about the 1960s and 1970s. If I have to throw it out, can I do anything useful with it? Can I use it in the garden to collect weeds, perhaps? Can I clean it up and use it for storage? If I really have to get rid of it, can I possibly recycle it?
But for disposable packaging…?
Well, there bioplastics definitely have a big part to play. If you bear in mind that plastic bags have an average useful life of 12 minutes, but live on in landfills for 500 years, you can see there’s a real value in having plastic food packaging that disappears very quickly. Especially for things like sweets and crisps, where there’s a high chance that any packaging is going to end up as litter. But bioplastics aren’t the only solution–and they may not even be the best one. Another option is to turn the problem back on the manufacturers. The main reason we have plastic packaging is to extend the shelf life of foods so that big corporations can make more money. Okay, fine, so let them accept some of the responsibility for the “plastic monster” they’ve created. Eco groups like Surfers Against Sewage have been campaigning on this for some time, encouraging people to post rubbish they find on beaches (80% of it is plastic, incidentally) back to the companies who produced it. (They call it “Return to Offender”!) Packaging is relatively easy to trace back to the people who made it–it’s stamped with their name. So how about councils being able to fine manufacturers for litter as well as the people who drop it? We’re hearing now that the cost of litter collection in the UK is soon going to hit a billion pounds a year. Let the people who profit from packaging pay some of the costs. Then they’d put a bit more effort into educating people about disposing of waste, using less packaging, and developing more eco-friendly plastics.
What’s the one thing people should take away from all this?
King Henry VIII! Remember how long plastic lasts and what it costs the environment (in resources, energy, and litter). Use as little of it as you can. When you get rid of plastic things, try to give them another life first (use your old toothbrush for cleaning your bike, or whatever) and recycle them if you can’t. There’s no excuse for plastic litter–and throwing away plastic is almost as bad
Find out more about related matters on
And loads of other interesting stuff at www.explainthatstuff..com
You can buy Chris’s books from
Paper Bags
If you want to buy plastic free food you really need to supply your own packaging. This will open up a massive range of plastic free options. It will also help you avoid the hormone inhibitors and toxic chemicals that leach from plastic packaging into your food.
Sometimes you need a disposable bag, one that can be composted or burnt when done.
I use brown Kraft food grade bags.
They are great for
Cheese and stuff that sweats,
Mushrooms and vegetables (if you don’t have reusable produce bags)
Sandwiches, buns and biscuits,
They are an essential component in the plastic free, take your own packaging, shopping kit.
Sadly they are not so easy to get hold of. I bought my first load from Ebay which worked out expensive and they came, yes you’re way ahead of me, wrapped in plastic.
Finally I located a local paper bag seller who sold in bulk. They too came wrapped in plastic but it was polythene so easily recycled. It also represented a massive reduction in packaging.
The only downside now is that despite using them on a regular basis, there is still a huge pile of paper bags in the airing cupboard.
Paper bags can be bought from hundreds of shops on the internet, including Amazon & Ebay.
Places to Use Your Bags
Find loose food outlets listed on the loose foods list
Please note the scoop and save heading refers to a chain of shops so there will be more than one town listed in the one post.
More Information
Other kinds of useful, plastic free bags are listed here.
Find out about composting here
Foil Card and Paper, Plastic lined
Paper & Card
Paper and card are made from natural fibres and is biodegradable.
Both can be recycled.
Paper/card can also be further treated to make it more durable.
Laminated Paper has a thin lining of plastic.This is true of labels through to book covers. Plasticized paper products include almost all paper products used in food packaging for example wraps of sugar and disposable cups.
Greaseproof Paper also known as parchment paper is used in baking and cooking. It provides a heat-resistant, non-stick surface to bake on.
It is also used to pack greasy foods like butter.
It used to be made by beating the paper fibres. Now it may have a plastic or chemical coating. even the stuff you cook on.Read more here
Waxed Paper Waxed paper was coated with wax to make it water proof. In most cases was has now been replaced with plastic laminated paper. It looks like waxed paper or card but isn’t. Tetra paks are an example of plastic laminated card replacing waxed cardboard containers. Read here
Foil
Most foil used to pack food is also plastic laminated.Butter wraps wine corked and foil lids are all laminated with a thin layer of plastic.
Spotting Laminated Products
To find out if paper or foil is plastic coated you can try tearing it which may cause the plastic and paper to part company. Often this won’t happen and the product will tear almost like paper but if you look carefully you will see a very fine frill of clear plastic.
If you are still not sure try soaking the wrapper in water – eventually the paper or foil will separate from the plastic film.
More
Paper can also be bleached – which is unpleasant. Read more about bleached paper here.
Other plastic lined products include cardboard, tins and cans.
Find other sneaky plastics here….
Estonia Tallin 2011
Being plastic free in central Tallinn is hard work because unlike other European towns there are no small shops selling tasty food stuff. In amongst the endless amber emporiums, (big in the Baltic is amber), we found one very expensive deli and one bakery. Everything else comes from the supermarkets.
As we were self catering we spent some time in them and they can be categorized s follows:
A normal one called Rimi in the town center
The posh Viru Keokus Supermarket in the basement of this very plush shopping arcade built by the bus station
Eastern block throwback – a strange smelling, grubby place near the No 4 tram stop – I would not recommend it.
All of the supermarkets were far too fond of plastic but even so there were some good things to be found.
In Rimi in central Tallin Estonia you can buy biodegradable corn starch bags essentail for plastic free shopping. You can also buy quite a good range of loose fruit and veg but you need to use your own bags. They do have some loose meat and fish but you will find better unwrapped selection over at Viru Keokus Supermarket.
Viru Keokus Supermarket also did unwrapped smoked salmon, fish and meat, loose cakes and buns, nuts and dried fruit. The apricots were a rather raddled and chewy but they kept us going through the long bus journey to Moscow.
The best place to shop plastic free is the market opposite the Tallin school of services which doubles as a hostel in Summer. Catch the No. 4 tram to Tallinn School of Service Hostel Lastekodu Street 13, Tallinn, Estonia . It’s a short journey – a few stops -5 to 10 minutes max. Here you wil find a rather institutional hostel and the central market which sells everything your greedy little heart could desire, mostly unwrapped and much cheaper then the superstores.
For all the above you need to take your own bio bags which you will have bought in Rima.
You can find more foreign plastic free places here…..
Fruit & Vegetables
There are several options
Buy fresh loose at a shop or supermarket.
Vegetable/Fruit Box – where seasonal produce is delivered to your door
Visit a pick you own farm
Grow some
Foraged
Frozen
Dried
Huddersfield
Things to do with fruit
Buy
If you are lucky enough to still have a green grocer do support them and buy your veg there.
Weekly markets are another good option.
If not many supermarkets do sell some veg unpackaged.
BUT when you commit to buy unpackaged, your choice may (will!) be reduced. Often soft fruits like strawberries are almost impossible to find unpackaged and you have to wait till Summer and pick your own. Organic produce is very often packed in plastic to make sure no one tries to pass it off as cheaper non-organic. Sometimes you may have to choose between packaged, fair-trade or unpackaged, not. You have to decide which criteria are more important to you.
Bearing in mind all the above, It is possible to have a varied diet – but you may not be able to have what you want whenever you want. If you choose to buy local fruit in season you will find it tastes better, is more likely to come unpackaged and, in the case of fruit, less likely to be waxed. In short be flexible, buy local(ish), see what is on offer and think what you can with that.
N.B. YOU WILL NEED TO TAKE YOUR OWN PACKAGING. Check out the plastic-free shopping kit here.
Fruit & Veg Boxes
A vegetable box scheme is an operation that delivers fresh fruit and vegetables to your door. Their are plenty of schemes produce to choose from. Some are small scale organisations but there are a few nationwide operators, many guarantee locally grown produce, others concentrate on organic. Generally you pay a fixed monthly sum and get what is in season, some offer a limited choice. But there are new suppliers popping up all the time with different options.
Packaging is often reduced but there will be some. Do check before you choose a scheme.
This Indépendant article on the 7 best schemes is useful read. You can also ask the Plastic Is Rubbish group for tips.
Pick Your Own
Go to the farm and pick your own. Most of them do fruit- usually soft fruit, but some also do vegetable. Find one near you with this great farm finder website.
Grow
Its easy and fun. You can start with basil in a pot perhaps a few lettuces in a window box or get yourself and allotment. However big or small your project nothing beats home grown fresh food.
Foraged
Check out mother natures bounty – nettles, elderberries and blackberries are free, wild and so almost certainly organic.
Frozen
you can buy frozen fruit & veg loose from these suppliers
Dried Fruit
Sometimes whats on offer is so boring you might want to turn to dried fruit. There are a few places you can buy dried fruit loose and unpackaged. Try the loose food list
More
Waxed Fruit
Wax is added to fruit to make it last longer and /or look better. Coatings manufacturers guard their trade secrets and are tight-lipped about their ingredients. There is a big science in wax coatings. Fruit wax can be either natural, like carnuba wax, or they can be petroleum based. Some are also coated in shellac resin which is secreted by the female lac beetle. A lot of vegans are very vocal about this, as it is an animal based product being sprayed on produce. Read more here….
Soft Fruits Huddersfield
Summer, a time for soft fruit strawberries raspberries and blackcurrants. Hurrah….but of course they all pre-packed in plastic tubs. We are lucky – we do have an allotment and do grow our own. But what with the slugs and the greedy guests we never quite have enough to see us through so we on a hot, sunny weekend we drive off to our local pick you own farm Bently Grange
Find one near you with this great farm finder website.
Urban Harvest
Urban Harvest, Leeds: This group harvests unwanted apples and juices them. You can join in or just buy the juice. More details here
Abundance, York is a similar urban harvesting project but it gives the fruit to community groups.
It “identifies fruit growing that would otherwise go to waste, and redistributes it to charities or community groups that will make good use of it.
Fantastic Things To Do With Fruit
Got a glut? Over picked at the farm? Storing seasonal fruit for the hard times ahead? Here are some things you can do:
- Juice it
- Jam it
- Make sweet mince meat
- Ferment it into booze!
- Make syrups & cordials for refreshing summer drinks.
Cutlery – travel
The buffet cars on Polish trains are so cute. They are relatively modern but have an old-fashioned feel. Perhaps it’s that they have tables, serve proper meals and the order is taken by uniformed staff. Even the food, while not being actually good, is acceptable. Proper cooked dinners of the meat and two veg variety. Yes it’s more canteen food than fine dining, but as most fast food in Britain doesn’t even meet that low standard we were satisfied.
We were not so pleased with the table ware -. Plastic cutlery arghh. Luckily we had planned for just such a contingency and brought our own knife fork and spoon. Of the folding variety. Not just for trains, if you want to backpack plastic free through Europe these are essential for the street fairs selling yummy food.These folding forks have enabled us to enjoy shovel up fried potatoes and spear a sausages guilt free..
You will also need your own tiffin tins to put the food in.
Ours Are all metal and come in a polyester carry case but with no extra packaging. we bought them from Blacks in Leeds.
Folding chopsticks are also very handy.
And here’s the rest of our plastic free travel kit
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| Lifeventure Knife, Fork, Spoon Folding Cutl… | Travel Stainless Steel Foldable Pocket Chop… |
Being committed to local shopping I prefer to buy that way whenever possible. I would encourage you to do the same. One of the joys of living plastic free is mooching round the local shops seeing what you can source.
If you can’t buy local, please do check the links in the posts. They link direct to the suppliers. Do consider buying from them and support their online businesses.
If you can’t do that then I have put together and Amazon catalogue. Yes I know…
Amazon is a very dirty word at the moment and I thought long and hard before suggesting them. Heres why I went ahead….. No we are not entirely happy with Amazons recent history. However these links are for 3rd party sellers, we have always found the Amazon service to be good and their packaging usually compostable. In the absence of anything else we feel we can recommend them.
If you buy a product via this link we do get an affiliation fee for this. That’s not why we do it.