The soft plastics idea

It’s almost impossible to avoid alarming quantities of soft plastics insinuating their way into our lives.  

Recently I shared a sorry tale of a new bike chain arriving in the mail wrapped in four different plastic layers and of course there’s the dismaying amount of plastic packaging for pasta, wraps, crackers, cheese, chips, cereal, dog food etc etc etc etc.

We so desperately want to do something about plastic inundation in our lives that when given the opportunity to send our bags and wrappers back via the Coles & Woolies RedCYCLE scheme we were dropping off 144 tons of soft plastics of every week.  

The realisation that all those plastic bags that we conscientiously collected and dropped off were sitting in warehouses destined for landfill has left a cloud of collective hopelessness hanging over us ever since.

Every few weeks at home I empty a bin of soft plastics and take them into the Fair Food warehouse to go in with our commercial soft plastics recycling service.

It’s momentarily satisfying to see our bags and wrappers together with the pallet-wrap, bulk salad liners and banana ripening film go off to be recycled and reused.

But the plastics from just one house are a drop in the ocean and the moment soon passes.

Then another idea came – if our family’s soft plastics could go in with the Fair Food recycling why couldn’t we do the same for Fair Food customers?  

We could give people a collection bag and pick it up when we dropped people’s grocery orders off.

After many years in the online grocery delivery business I have learned that even the most simple and straightforward sounding idea somehow finds itself innocently wandering into the equivalent of a maze built on a tar pit populated by bitey bitey March flies. 

A meeting was called to discuss the idea and a series of logistics, financial and communications questions soon emerged:
How would it work? 
What would people put their soft plastics in? 
How would everyone know what soft plastics could or couldn’t be recycled? 
How could we tell everyone they had to clean their soft plastics first? 
How much soft plastic did people have to recycle? 
What would it cost? 

At meeting’s end everyone seemed a little bewildered when the soft plastics idea somehow navigated the maze, shimmied around the tar pit and emerged from the meeting completely bite free.

With a collective “huh” the Fair Food’s logistics, customer service and communications teams went off to begin pulling together the pieces we’d need to launch the soft plastics idea in the next few months.

If you’ve got any thoughts or questions you’d like to add to the discussion send us an email at info@ceresfairfood.org.au 

Doubling donations

Early last Wednesday morning I shared the screenshot above on the Fair Food team’s WhatsApp.

1,386 incredibly generous donors, a lot of community love and media coverage had gotten the CERES Annual Appeal over the line three weeks ahead of the 30th of June deadline.

That day everyone at CERES rejoiced.

Then the question arose, what do we do now?

The answer came in the form of four large donors encouraging us to keep the appeal going with an offer to match every donation made before 30 June, dollar-for-dollar.

Every extra pledge will help provide the breathing room CERES needs to adapt and continue.

With your help, CERES will be here growing food, community and climate solutions for many years to come.

I just looked at the Annual Appeal Page and it’s just passed $235,000.

Have a great week

Chris