Plastic-free Me: Falling out of love with cling film

When initiating a blog on single-use plastics, it seems to me that a good place to start is with cling film – the king of throw away kitchen plastic.

Prior to July 2013, or Plastic Free July as I now call it, cling film was my friend. Not my best friend – we fought a bit about the rips, the tangles and that damned pain-inducing serrated-edged packet – but generally we rubbed along pretty well and never did we fall out to the point that I looked for an alternative.

Until July that is, when I was forced to think about what it actually was that I was using – plastic made up of chemicals (plasticizers, whatever the heck these are) that no website I have seen can actually convince me are definitely safe.

Plus, once thrown away, cling film hangs around for an unspecified length of time to pollute the environment, both as a piece of rubbish and to share these (possibly unsafe) chemicals with the environment.

I decided to stop using it and, do you know what? It was actually pretty easy!

That’s me cling film free for July 2015 and avoiding this type of single use plastic is so easy that I’m now doing it all the time anyway. Here are some of my cling film alternatives…

Loaves of bread from the breadmaker are now kept fresh in a pretty tin.

Plates of food I reheat in the microwave are covered with another plate.

I store the leftover contents of tinned foods such as sweetcorn or baked beans in the fridge in a mug covered with a ‘One Lid’ which is air-tight from Onya Bags.

Packed lunches are kept fresh in these reusable sandwich wraps from Keep Leaf.

Leftovers are kept in Tupperware-type containers in the fridge.

Snacks on the go are transported in these melamine pots.

Easy! There’s not been any situation that I haven’t managed to come up with a cling-film free alternative.

I probably bought 2-3 rolls of cling film a year which amounted to around £6. Not the biggest saving in the world but it’s £6 I’m no longer literally putting in the bin. If you’re concerned about the cost of my clever gadgets such as the One Lid or the Keep Leaf sandwich wrap then check out this post and you’ll see we made substantial savings from making packed lunches to avoid the over-plasticisation* of my other half’s shop bought lunches at work. I charged him £1 per lunch to cover the cost of sustainable packaging…

Please share any alternatives to cling film that you have with me  – as July approaches I may update my posts with any improvements I have discovered.

*word of the week!

Previous post in this series:
Plastic-free Me: introduction