Plastic Free Partying

It was a bit of while ago now, but the summer party season got started in early June with this year’s birthday for the youngest offspring. Which meant a kid’s party, which meant another plastic redacting challenge – a plastic-free kids party!

The key ingredients to any kids’ party are activities to keep the kids entertained, decorations, food and drink, cake and party bags. And inevitably this can lead to a lot of single use plastic waste. Disposable table cloths, cups, plates, serving dishes, fruit juice cartons, fizzy pop bottles, plastic party bag cocooning cheap plastic toys and plastic sealed sweets... Not to mention all the crisps, little sausages, sausages rolls, cling-film wrapped sandwiches (which, of course, none of the kids eat!) and cling-film covered veg optimistically put out as a token nod to healthy eating (which again, none of the kids will eat).

One way to get around this itinerary of waste is to simply say no to some or all of it. By scheduling the party from 2pm till 4pm, we freed ourselves from the expectation of having to provide a full party tea – instead, we could lay on a mid-afternoon snack. Some things are immovable in the Harrison household such as little sausages. So, it was off to the butchers to buy some chipolatas, some of which were chopped up into little sausages (no cocktail sticks though – whoever thought that was a good idea in the first place?). The remainder were combined with some home-made flaky pastry (thanks Delia) made for some above-average sausage rolls.

The oven, indeed, was working overtime the morning of the party – we also did some home-made pizza slices and home-made biscuits. The market provided the raw material for some, er, raw veg sticks. (Did the kids eat them? Ach, it’s a month ago, I can’t remember.) The only plastic-packaged luxury was some bags of crisps – thus cementing the status of crisps in our house as being for special occasions only!

Enough about food. Let’s talk bling – by which, I mean decorations. The bonus of having two children is of course that the second child is free – by which I mean, you’ve already got a lot of the stuff you used the first time around. We’ve duly kept a lot of decorations from various parties past – a Happy Birthday banner or two did the job nicely. In fact, somehow we’ve received a very 80’s happy birthday banner from an in-law clear out from Mr Harrison’s birthday’s past. Very retro. No balloons, though. You gasp in horror – surely balloons at a party are a basic human right when it comes to kid’s parties right? What kinda cruel parent am I? Well, plastic balloons are a pretty rubbish thing to crop up in the oceans, and as a soft plastic they can wreak havock on sea birds and turtles when injected. Some American research has shown that once ingested that kill almost one in five birds. So yeah, balloons blow.

We’d been a little bit worried that the lack of balloons might be a bone of contention with the kids, but do you know what? None of them noticed. Likewise, we chose party games that were naturally plastic free – musical statues, pin the tail on the unicorn, and pass the parcel (all right, a little bit of cellotape involved in that last one). The contents of the parcel were all matchbox cars, sourced from local charity shops – a decisive blow against the tyranny of little bags of sweets. This had the added benefit of creating a bonus game for the kids, when we propped up some drain pipes in the garden for them to race the cars down.

After the games, it was time for the party tea. We dodged the trap of disposable tablecloths, serviettes, paper plates and cups by serving it up on a picnic blanket in ceramic dishes (yes, we took the risk). Rather than give the kids paper plates, we just relied on them eating hand-to-mouth – which they all did without complaint. And to top off all the fun – a lot less washing up!

For drinks I was able to make a supper big order from Milk and More – apple, orange and cranberry juice all delivered with the milk in a massive crate on Friday morning. Very exciting. And apparently kids are sophisticated guzzlers of cranberry juice – who knew.

The birthday cake is always a home-made job in our house, so this was nothing new. The only new thing were the ridiculous demands of the birthday girl in the days/weeks/months before the big day. What sort of cake d’you want, we would ask. Some days it would be a ballerina cake, other days a unicorn cake – eventually the demands merged into the unholy final demand for a ballerina-princess-unicorn cake. A bit of selective deafness on our part led to the finished product being a unicorn cake, which if nothing else created a bit of coherence with the pin-the-tail-on-the-unicorn game. (A footnote – you can buy a pin-the-tail-on-the-unicorn set in Asda, among other places, but Mr Harrison’s artistic pride was pricked enough for him to draw a unicorn on a sheet of A3 and make some tails out of scrap paper).

Asda was good for party bags, however. Mr Harrison found paper party bags there that weren’t wrapped in plastic. You can also get them from Sainsbury’s. The party bags were loaded up with Ladybird books from charity shops and sweets in paper bags from the local sweet shop.

If this all sounds like it was very easy – well, it was (well apart from being at the mercy of the oven the day before)! That was perhaps the most liberating thing – the fact that, if you choose not to make the usual choices, you can very easily come up with and find alternatives that are just as good. The kids didn’t seem to notice anything different, so the party passed muster with the punters. And in addition to the warm glow we got from having happy kids at the end of the day, we also got the satisfaction of having spent less money, been a smidge more creative, and lived up to our “reduce, reuse, recycle” ethos on an occasion where we might otherwise have said “sod it, we’ll have a day off from plastic redacting”.

Well, apart from the crisps, of course. Like we said, some things are non-negotiable!