Drowning in Single Use Plastic

So, I’ve always been good about recycling, right? Well I thought so.

I wash all my plastic and glass bottles, for recycling, plus flatten any boxes and recycle them too. I clean the polystyrene trays and all the tins get washed and they go to recycling as well. I put all my non-recyclable plastic into clean 5 litre oil bottles. to be used as an eco bricks (not too sure where or how as I seem to have quite a collection of these now! Maybe I will have to build something myself!).

I know a lot of what goes to recycling still can’t be recycled but that’s a story for another time.

But something really got to me a few weeks ago. It was a sudden wake up call!….There’s an awful lot of plastic that I don’t recycle or put into the eco brick bottle. Plastic that is ‘yucky’ like the bags that my dogs meat comes in or the cling wrap over meat. Or the milk bottle that went unwashed and now is an issue to clean. I started noticing that anything that wasn’t easy to clean got chucked out.

So I made a decision there and then that, where possible, ALL plastic that passed my way would be cleaned and recycled or put into the eco brick bottle.

Now I am drowning in plastic… draped all over the place trying to dry… so it can be recycled or “bottled”. Thin plastic dog’s meat bags, cling wrap to cover hundreds of metres (or so it seems), other plastic bags from veggie burgers or frozen foods.

I feel like I am literally drowning in plastic.

It has shocked me how much plastic I was still throwing away because it was going to be unpleasant to clean.

Are you the same? or is it just me?