Plastic is becoming a very dirty word, and so it should be, as mountains of it float around our planets oceans, destroying entire eco systems and killing whales and other animals. Plastic Free July is of course highlighting the importance of reducing plastic and people like Daniel Webb are collecting plastic for a year to highlight the alarming amount of plastic packaging we use. As a scientist who owns a body products business, Two-winged Fruit, I'm very much in favour of reducing consumption and waste of every thing we don't need, including plastic. I have been taking my groceries home in re-usable shopping bags for about a decade, so I'm staggered at the backlash against the recent plastic bag ban, particularly given the images I've seen of marine life strangled in plastic break my heart.At Two-Winged Fruit, where possible we are moving to recycled packaging including plastic, and there are a number of really important reasons that we do.
There has been a rise in popularity of package-free products. For example, shampoo bars. Shampoo bars are attractive because you can wash your hair with something that hasn't come in a bottle. This is great, but just make sure the one you buy has been made from sustainable ingredients. Consider where the raw ingredients started off and how much effort (i.e. energy cost) it took to get them into the final product. E.g. are the ingredients made from petroleum, palm oil or an endangered plant? Have they travelled from the farthest part of the world to get into your product?Several shampoo bars I have seen contain palm oil-derived ingredients. The palm oil industry is rapidly destroying precious tropical rainforests, and wiping out every living creature along the way. There is nothing planet-friendly about a shampoo bar that contains palm oil.
Two-winged Fruit prefer to use recycled plastics where we can and we are always looking for better solutions. This is for a very good reason. While there is little question that we need far less plastic packaging on the planet, it is extremely important that we use the stuff we already have before making more new stuff of any kind. And the more recycled materials we use, the more we support our recycling manufacturing industry and should encourage our councils and governments to do the same.The problem for many small businesses, which is very frustrating, is access to stock when minimum order quantities for specialised products are often 10,000+. For the products above,we are still using new PET plastic bottles until I can source more recycled plastic options.
We think very systemically here at Two-winged fruit and that is why we choose to reduce our environmental impact in the ways we do.