A month without plastic

I am giving up plastic for the whole of August.

By this I mean not buying or accepting anything which contains plastic or is packaged in plastic.

… I am, if you like, donning a polyester-free hairshirt – with the aim of seeing how possible it is to live without new plastic.

Durable, versatile, lightweight, hygienic, cheap and strong: synthetic plastic is arguably one of the most useful inventions of the last century.

It is essential in medical equipment, technology and thousands of devices which have increased our standard of living.

But those very same attributes of durability and cheapness make plastic one of the most pervasive forms of waste on the planet.

… But I, like almost everyone else in the UK, junk the vast majority of plastic which comes into my home.

I’ve kept a month’s worth of my plastic waste, to use as a barometer for my month of abstinence. It isn’t pretty – 603 items, including …