HAVE A TEA BREAK THAT A WON’T POLLUTE THE PLANET

GET BACK WITH YOUR MILKMAN!

DRAMATICALLY reduce your plastic imprint by cutting out plastic milk cartons and arranging for milk to be delivered to your door in glass bottles instead.

Go to findmeamilkman.net to discover if milk deliveries come to your area. You just rinse out your used milk bottle and leave it outside your door to be taken away with your next delivery. Many services deliver fruit juice in glass bottles, too.

There’s no delivery cost, but milk is slightly more expensive at about 81p a pint (compared to 50p from a large supermarket).

THE POD COFFEE SCOURGE

IF YOU already use a glass-sided cafetiere to make your coffee, or a metal boil-on-the-hob espresso jug, then give yourself a well-earned pat on the back.

We both worry that standard filter coffee makers drip boiling water through plastic, which could allow toxic chemicals to leach into your coffee. The worst coffee comes from mini-pod machines — a plastic scourge! A depressing amount end up in landfill due to their size (small plastic items frequently fall through the recycling net), contamination, (you can’t rinse the coffee grounds out before recycling) and the complex combination of plastic plus foil on the lid.

If you do have one of these machines and you are feeling guilty after reading the above, don’t despair: you can find biodegradable compostable pods (£2.99 for ten, ocado.com).

Nespresso is meeting criticism by offering a free recycling service. Sign up at nespresso.

com to get a free recycling bag (which takes 200 pods).

When it is full you can download a freepost

label and send it back to Nespresso to be recycled (into more recycling bags). It is a good idea to use an Italian style metal stove top espresso maker instead (see selection, right).

You can also find glass or stainless steel pour-over coffee drippers at cook shops, such as the Hario coffee dripper (£35, steamer.co.uk). If you pair one of these with a reusable or compostable paper filter (£2.80 for 100, ethicalsuperstore.com), you have a sustainable, plastic-free coffee-making system.

TAKE PLASTIC IN YOUR TEA?

FEW people realise that tea bags contain plastic. The worst offenders are the slightly shiny premium-priced pyramidshaped mesh tea bags that look and feel like plastic — that’s because they are made of it.

But even regular paper tea bags have their edges sealed in plastic glue.

Six billion tea bags are used in the UK every year and the majority of them are held together with heatsealed polypropylene.

That’s around 150 tons of accumulated plastic waste which is either contaminating food waste compost collections or going into landfill.

Notable exceptions are Teapigs tea bags which are made from corn starch rather than nylon, and Pukka tea bags which are 100 per cent biodegradable and sewn shut with some cotton thread. Last week the Co-op announced it is making its own-brand Fairtrade 99 teabags free of polypropylene and will have them on sale by the end of the year. The really diligent plastic-averse could try using cotton reusable teabags which you fill yourself (£6.99 for 100, tea-direct.co.uk). Or, to make things a little easier, spoon some leaf tea into a metal tea ball infuser (£6, whittard.co.uk) or use an old-fashioned tea strainer (£3.49, robertdyas.co.uk). Easiest still, use a tea pot with an integral infuser ‘basket’, such as John Lewis’s glass teapot (£22, johnlewis.com). High Street chain Whittard also sells a range of loose tea and coffee (in paper and cardboard pouches) and will decant these into your own bag or container.