Friday

I’m nearing the end of my challenge and today have decided to take the fight against packaging to another level: the bathroom. Did you know there are seven kinds of PET plastic – a common form of the material, used in most everyday objects, including the little bottles containing God knows what in my bathroom cabinet – and that only two are easily recyclable? Well you do now…

I begin well with some soap and water meets face action, but then have a crisis of conscience over whether to use shampoo from a PET 7 (non-recyclable) bottle. Under the shower, I’m haunted by the memory of the time I set out to avoid all products with added chemicals and made my own salt body scrub instead. Unfortunately, I used flaky sea salt and rubbed it into my skin with such anti-additive passion that my mum thought I was self-harming and I went out that night looking like a Jackson Pollock canvas.

Rather than revisit that nightmare, I let vanity prevail and lather up.

That’s one point to you non-recyclable packaging.

Saturday

It’s 1 am and I’m armed with a tequila in one hand and something icy in the other, despite having to go walking through Richmond Park with a friend in a few hours. When I do finally exit the house to the sound of raised voices and door slamming, I buy a large coffee in a takeaway cup to both wake me up and calm me down.

I marvel at the brand power of [big name coffee chain here] and truly believe I have just purchased peace of mind in a cup – as opposed to some second-rate coffee beans, non-organic milk and large hit of sugar.

The excess packaging – lid, cardboard sleeve, napkin, stirrer – that accompanies my drink is unasked-for, but is nevertheless the company’s way of showing me that they’re taking care of all my possible needs and that this is not just a hot drink.

Of course, while these added extras can be recycled, they won’t be. When was the last time you saw a convenient plastics bin on a London high street?

I manage to get myself back in the game by bringing a refilled water bottle from home, and come lunchtime my friend and I chow down in a pub – so no packaging there.

But later, as the night before starts to gnaw at the back of my head, my fellow adventurer forcibly stuffs a cereal bar in my mouth to stop me whining.

We’ll call that a draw.

Sunday

A very late night out, and this time I don’t ask the bar what its recycling policy is. Or the club we go to. Or the next one.

At some point we end up taking an hour-long taxi journey through parts of London that makes me ask if we’ve been magically transposed to the Bronx. As the driver stops to fill up with petrol, I see my eco-credentials run off into the night and take up with a gang of teenagers kicking their way into a shop on the other side of the road.

On my way home I rid myself of what little change I have left to buy The Observer. I’m pretty sure I didn’t spend what money I had on anything packaged – but then again I’m dead certain that I hung out with a roller-skating old man dressed in a skeleton suit in deepest Kilburn last night and, according to my travel card, spent some time in Ealing Broadway.

In the evening I bake muffins and make soup from scratch in an attempt to woo my eco-credentials back home.

The Aftermath

This week’s ordeal has made me take a step back and consider just how much I consume, and ultimately throwaway. Here are some startling facts about our lifestyle in the UK:

40% of household waste is packaging, and over half of that comes with our food.

As a country, we pay £2 million a year to landfill recyclable cans worth £23 million. That’s £25 million down the drain before you even open your plastic sandwich box.

Only 5% of the 275,000 tonnes of plastic water bottles used in the UK every year are recycled – yet recycling just one bottle saves enough energy to power a light-bulb for six hours.

But shiny cereal bar wrappers, Styrofoam coffee cups and salon-priced shampoo in plastic bottles aside, my week-long stand against throwaway packaging has been a success. As a result of my new and improved consumer lifestyle, my carbon footprint is not only smaller, but my food shopping is both quicker and cheaper, my waistline slimmer and my wallet fuller.

And a richer, sexier me has got to be good news for the planet.

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