In case you haven’t, TipTop recently changed the toggles that help keep the plastic bread bags tied up from plastic to cardboard.
Whilst we applaud the thought behind this, there’s a couple of things we’d like to highlight with this change.
Firstly, there is still single use plastic bread bags being used to house the bread itself.
While the soft plastic bread bag CAN be recycled through a program like REDcycle, they’re often not and end up in landfill or our waterways.
We need to shift our focus away from the thinking up ways to recycle plastic once we’re finished with it to reducing our initial consumption to begin with. There's only so many recycled plastics items you can make after all, and they are still plastic at the end of the day.
If we can buy one reusable (compostable) bread bag to replace a years worth (or more) of plastic bread bags (quite possibly hundreds each), then why shouldn’t we?
The other thing is the toggle itself, even with being made from cardboard requires more thought than just chucking it in your yellow bin for recycling. ‘Small items like this can literally fall through the cracks in sorting machines, causing damage to the machines or ending up in landfill’. As quoted on https://theconversation.com/five-golden-rules-to-help...
They must be collected and put within a larger recyclable container to be recycled effectively, which unfortunately not everyone will know or do.
So, to repeat myself, although this is on the right track of thinking, we need to be pushing these companies to think more broadly to implement plastic free changes and really make a difference.
