Equip yourself in the kitchen
against everyday plastic waste

Due to its characteristics, plastic quickly became essential in our daily life. It is found everywhere around us and even in the great depths of our oceans. Since it never really disappears when degrading into micro-plastics, it affects the entire environment and the food chain. It is therefore high time to find alternatives in order to stop pollution at its source.

As individuals, we can quickly tackle the plastic products that are in two of the main rooms of our homes: the kitchen and the bathroom.

Here are some alternatives to plastics in your kitchen: food packaging, coffee pods, plastic bottles, straws and plastic cups.

Plastic food films are unfortunately mostly disposable. They are therefore very often found among our plastic waste. Replacing them with aluminium foil might seem like a good idea, but it is not the best solution as it requires a lot of energy to manufacture and recycle. Here are more ecological alternatives.

Coffee pods produce about 10 times more waste than traditional coffee packages and their recycling is far from obvious. In France, only 10% of some 200 sorting centers are equipped with “eddy current” machines that allow the removal of aluminum through a magnetic field. Pods that contain plastic and coffee residue can not be melted directly in a conventional oven. To effectively recycle, the pods would have to go to the Netherlands for cleaning, before being shipped to Italy to remove the lacquer and melt it in ingots then in Germany to turn the ingots into sheets and finally in Switzerland to transform the metal in capsules. But to make capsules from old capsules still remains a project undergoing research and development.

So why not replace them with refillable pods or even better, return to the coffee maker? And for tea bags, just replace them with teaspoons and end the problem.

More than 1 million plastic bottles are sold every minute in the world. Only 7% of that collected is transformed into new bottles and most of them end up in dumps or in the ocean. For each of them it takes more than 400 years to decompose in nature. In order to remove this source of plastic one should fill a ground with tap or filtered water to transport it rather than a single-use container. Here is a list of innovations that can help you remove them from your everyday life.

The plastic straw is one of the most commonly used objects found at sea. It is a real plague for fish and turtles. Yet there are alternatives in metal and bamboo, to avoid throwing them 2 minutes after consumption.

In France, 4.73 billion disposable cups are consumed each year, which is worth 150 cups per second, or 32 000 tons of plastic waste per year. Unfortunately only 1% of the cups lets are recycled, 34% or 1.6 billion are incinerated, 50% are landfilled and the remaining 15% are abandoned in the wild and take 500 years to degrade completely. Disposable cups use 4 times more natural resources than reusable cups for their manufacture so you too, fight against this aberration.