Living plastic free for a week on a student budget

I made this as part of my final project for my degree but I thought I should share it here too. I have put a lot of work into this experiment and it has taken me three weeks to put the final product together and I am both relieved and excited about it.

I decided to take this on as I realised a lot of my daily use products were packaged in plastic. So I bought some replacements and documented my week using them and doing everything in my power not to use plastic in my day-to-day life.

​Here are the results:

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Throughout the week, I found that most of the things that I thought would be difficult to adjust to (such as switching to the new hair products, remembering my coffee cup and water bottle, all the things that weren’t in my regular routine) were really easy after the first couple of days and I was able to adjust quickly.
 
However, the easy things like buying lunch at university or food shopping turned out to be a lot more difficult.
 
In the supermarket I found that almost everything is wrapped in plastic. Yes, you can buy fresh loose fruit and vegetables, but you can’t buy meat not wrapped in plastic – I even tried taking in a box for the meat counter but was told they weren’t allowed to sell it that way.
 
In the student shops and kiosks at university I found that plastic free options were limited to drinks cans and that was about it. You couldn’t even use a reusable coffee cup at the machine because they don’t fit.
 
This is probably due to plastic being a quick and easy product for companies to use. It’s cheap to produce and buy, quick to make, and there is an endless supply. Unfortunately, that makes it very hard for us to help our planet by living plastic free.
 
The big take away that I got from this experiment was yes, it is possible to live plastic-free on a student budget, but you have to be a lot more meticulous about how you live. It isn’t as easy as it should be!
 
But I strongly believe that if enough people start living plastic free, then the demand for reusable and environmentally friendly products will go up, forcing companies to follow that course.

This week was interesting, it was rewarding, and it opened my eyes up to how great plastic-free living can be and I strongly recommend it to everyone!