Is living 'packaging free' possible?

My household has been challenging itself to live without single-use consumer packaging (including stuff we had in stock) for the month of March. Why?

In part because Eunomia is currently analysing options for revisions to the EU’s Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive, including potential regulatory measures to increase reuse of packaging. So I really wanted to see how far you could already go in a major city like Brussels to avoid single-use consumer packaging, and to test the practical implications of packaging refill for a busy professional couple.

At the same time, our household has been selected as one of 30 families to be part of the Brussels Zero Waste Challenge initiative. Each family commits to making lifestyle changes to minimise its waste over the course of a year, with the families ranging from ‘beginner’ to ‘advanced’ in terms of their circular economy credentials. My partner, Maxine, and I are generally pretty hot on ‘walking the walk’ when it comes to the waste hierarchy. But this challenge has pushed us to think about our consumption behaviour in all aspects of our lives – good psychological preparation for going without consumer packaging for a month!

But as someone who has run two food businesses in the past (one retail, one prepared food production), I have had a lot of very practical contact with packaging pros and cons, aside from my 20 years in circular economy consultancy. So I hope I have the right mix of waste prevention enthusiasm and ability to think critically about the technical, economic and social issues that trying to ‘do the right thing’ throws up to provide some useful observations.

So far, we have done pretty well, with our only consumer ‘packaging’ being really hard to avoid stuff like elastic bands around bunches of spring onions – with our residual waste down to less than 10g per capita per week ??. We’ve found solutions to everything we need and just about everything we want but have missed a few things (massive marmite craving in the first week for some reason). Snack and drink choices are much more limited, but generally healthier (more nuts, less potato/corn chips) and we’d be in serious trouble without the range of Belgian beers available in refillable bottles.

But it’s clear that some parts of the refillable packaging infrastructure we have here in Brussels works a lot better than others… We have picked up quite a few examples where it seems likely that the ‘food waste plus packaging’ footprint doesn’t stack up against single-use packaging, and many more where the benefits look marginal. Most of these look fixable through engineering and supply chain tweaks, but we’re certainly not there yet.

We’ve had to challenge a few retailers as well, as not everyone is immediately happy with filling your reusable packaging! Which also brings me onto the subject of plastic – if anything, we’ve been using plastic packaging more than usual (but only in reusable forms of course). It’s actually incredibly practical for lots of refilling situations, with containers that are lightweight and nest well making shopping for refill a lot more practical than lugging around a bag full of clanking jars.

I’ll be posting and blogging on the subject over the next few weeks; and for those who like that sort of thing, we are posting a few times a week on our Instagram. https://www.instagram.com/maxiandjoe1/