Pasta and rice

Pasta (in its many, many forms) and rice are a core foundation of several family meals in our house, not to mention the couscous, risotto rice, paella rice, noodles and lasagne sheets that all get thrown in the trolley at least once a month. Only one of these items always comes in a cardboard box – lasagne sheets – but even then you can’t get away from the plastic window that is invariably put on to show the consumer that yes, honest, there is what you need in the box. From our big shops at Sainsburys, the paella rice comes in a cardboard box (yay!) but with a tiny little plastic window (boo!).

For things not in a cardboard box, its all downhill in non-recyclable plastic wrap. Taking the kids to Sainsbury’s a couple of weeks ago, elder child said in that very loud way that only small kids have “but EVERYTHING is wrapped in plastic!”, which made me feel just a little bit proud that the brainwashing is working. There was a lot of cheering in the aisles by the kids in the cereal section when we found that breakfast cereal was probably going to be something we could be flexible on as the local council do collect the plastic bag (HDPE) to be recycled. But very worried looks from the kids in the pasta aisle…. was spaghetti bolognaise going to be off the menu forever?

A sea of plastic types

Annoyingly, a lot of the plastic bags that dried foods like pasta come in have no resin codes as to what the plastic is, and will generally have a “Not currently recycled” symbol on it. A quick check of Oxfordshire Bin zone says it all needs to go in the black bin. Drat.

I was interested in what the resin codes actually meant and then got a bit geeky tracking down the chemical formal for each type of plastic code. The fruit of my labours is below if you’re interested. The graphics shows the basic set-up of repeating units you find in the polymer chains that make up plastic. HDPE and LDPE essentially have the same formula but have different polymer structures.

Most of these can be recycled, but to do so takes more effort than it’s really worth. BBC News has a really good article on why plastic recycling is confusing – it’s because it’s complicated. For example, you might be buying a lovely pink or blue coloured HDPE bottle, but due to the additives used to colour the bottle, those colours can’t be removed, restricting what it can be recycled for. It also depends on the market for the receiving recycled plastic – PET used in drinks bottles is a good example of recycled PET being used for more drinks bottles, but polystyrene just doesn’t have the demand for it.

The graphic below is something I’ve drawn up from the article on the BBC to help me double check if the plastic is likely to be recyclable or not – if it’s not I need to try and avoid it.

However, this is only useful if there is actually a resin code on the package in the first place. Beginning to feel some letters to supermarkets and our MP coming on…

There is a solution that’s local!

So, before we have riots in our house due to the banning of pasta, Mr Harrison has resourcefully managed to track down some cardboard boxes of fusilli pasta (with little plastic window annoyingly) from the local Co-op near his work. Once again, it’s more expensive than the supermarket plastic wrapped own brand. I do wonder though; would a paper bag do the trick just like a bag of flour?

However, this month has also provided another useful source of plastic free (ish) shopping and they do pasta! We have a fairtrade shop in Wallingford call Just Trading, which just made plastic redacting a lot easier!

At the back, they have bumper packets of organic rice, pasta, grains, dried fruit and nuts, as well as herbs and spices. You can take in your own containers or buy some of their plastic bags and weigh out what you need on some electronic scales, scribble down what the price is and pay at the till. Also exciting, right at the very back are refills for washing up liquid and detergents etc, which I am sure I am going to blog about soon.

Elder child loves transferring the pasta from the scales into the paper bags we’ve kept from the fruit and veg market – though she does get a tad distracted from task by the toy aisle! Some of the products are going to be more expensive, though in some instances not so much – for example a 43g jar of cumin from Sainsburys costs 23p per 10g, while just trading will cost 22p per 10g – a 1p saving. Okay, not that big (couldn’t be smaller, in fact!), but at least I can refill my existing jar without having to buy another jar.

You can see that most of the products come in large plastic bags, but at least it’s reducing the number and volume of plastic bags. We may still get pasta in a cardboard box, but Just Trading gives us an alternative to other grains we would ordinarily pick up wrapped in a plastic bag.

So fusilli bolognaise tonight and the near future – hurrah!