5 Ways To Give Your Kitchen A Plastic-Free Makeover

Don’t throw everything out 

Once people have made the decision to go plastic-free, they tend to purge everything plastic from the kitchen. But as Jen sensibly points out, that just adds to the mountain of plastic waste.

Obviously, chucking out perfectly good plastic containers in a bid to become plastic free makes zero sense – hello extra stuff in the waste pile. But rather than buying more plastic, when yours wears out, choose an alternative. 

Some people choose steel containers with a glass compartment to see how full or empty it might be, while others prefer glass. Bamboo-lidded glass containers are friendly to the environment – not to mention super Instagrammable. That can also extend to implements in your kitchen, swapping plastic cutting boards for bamboo, and switching to glass mixing bowls.

“Even when it’s disposed of correctly,” says Jen, “plastic takes hundreds, maybe even thousands of years to break down in landfill, and actually breaks up, rather than breaks down, meaning it fragments into smaller and smaller pieces which can then enter food chains.

“Single use plastic is something we can use use every day, and therefore, it’s one aspect that we can all take action on without too much upheaval, and see very visible results, very quickly.”