Be More Eco 4: Making & Packing your own

One of the other things I did when I was trying to look at how to reduce our environmental impact as a household, was examine what made up the bulk of our plastic recycling - in an attempt to remove it completely.  Milk bottles were high on the list, as I said before. And some other bottles, which were not too hard to remove from the recycling. Another big thing I noticed, though, was yogurt pots and pots from hummous (we eat a LOT of hummous as a house). So, I decided to try to eliminate or reduce those things.  Making your own hummous is really easy - I've done it in the past, but not consistently.  But now, I've committed to always making my own.  If I am really organised, I do the chickpeas from dried, which is really cheap as well. If not, I just use a tin.

Yogurt was more difficult. I tried making yogurt in jars (I remember my mother doing this using the oven light as a small heat for batching, when I was a kid and yogurt was a new, exciting, European thing), but found it hard to get the temperatures right for batching, even after a lot of googling and experimentation (a couple of successes, but more times when it didn't set properly). So for my birthday, the kids got me an electric yogurt maker - it controls the batching temperature really well. 

This doesn't elimiate bought yogurt, in plastic, but it reduces the amount we buy. And it tastes nice. 

Another thing I've been doing for a while is this sort of thing - instead of buying prepared snack size packages of things, I package up my own.  I used to do this with little cubes of cheese for the kids when they took lunches to school (not always, but sometimes). I only have one child packing a lunch these days, but I also take a packed lunch, so once every couple of weeks I pull out a large selection of very small pots and make up a bunch of dried fruit and nut snack pots (you could leave the nuts out of course, if that's an issue).  You still have to buy the dried fruit in plastic bags, of course (though you can get a selection now at zero-waste shops, if you are lucky enough to have one near you), but it's still a huge reduction on packaging...