We are very pleased to announce that we are going single-use plastic free from this week!
After months of brain picking and testing out various compostable bags, we’ve found a solution which will benefit the environment as well as reduce the necessity for single-use plastics.
Why don’t you help us improve on sustainability and the environment?
1. Vegetable Nets
Please remember to leave out the vegetable nets for the drivers to pick up as we reuse these every week, they are not single-use so please don’t throw them out!
2. Empty Organic Tomato Jars
If you have received a tomato jar in your vegetable bag, please return this to us. The jars cost us £1 each and we decided to ingest the cost hoping most of you would return them. We may not be able to afford sending out anymore as we’ve had less than 5% returned so far and we won’t be able to get back the cost of the missing jars. This has proven quite expensive and the producer is running out of pressure jars.
We’ve had to use single-use plastic bags to pack leafy greens and salads as they would tend to wilt especially when stepping into the warmer seasons. The new bioplastic bags we will be using are fully compostable and will keep the vegetables fresh ! (Or why not re-use them as your green waste caddy liner?).
Interesting fact: There are three different types of degradable polymer materials and some of them are misleading!
We came across a few hurdles before choosing our plastic alternative and found out a lot during the way. There are degradable, biodegradable and compostable materials, all terms of which can be very misleading. Degradable and biodegradable plastics will degrade in nature but leave lots of microscopic non-degradable plastic residue wherever they break down, for this reason, they can not be composted in green waste.
Compostable materials are deemed to be suitable for compost, however these materials are categorised into two types: Plastic or Bioplastic.
Compostable Plastic will still contain mostly plastic polymers and require a special type of processing to fully compost, a process we believe does not exist in the UK.
However, Compostable Bioplastic is the one we opted for. It is made out of almost only plant materials such as starches, oils and cellulose and is 100% compostable. This means that you can place them in your normal food waste bin!
We are transitioning to our new earth-friendly alternative from this week , remember to leave out those veg nets and jars!
Best
The wee team at Helens Bay Organic