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The supermarket
The Clean Kilo, Birmingham
When Tom Pell and Jeanette Wong came up with the idea for the Clean Kilo in early 2017, and set about creating Birmingham’s first plastic-free, zero-waste supermarket, several aspects of their plan filled their loved ones with trepidation.
For starters, the couple, who had known each other for just six months, had no working knowledge of high-street food retail. Wong, who worked as a menswear designer in Birmingham, did at least have marketing and social media experience; Pell, a chemistry PhD retraining as a secondary school teacher, had “no business background whatsoever”.
What’s more, the market research they carried out yielded a mixed response. “People were bothered about plastic pollution, and they were quite open to the concept of the shop,” says Wong. But whether Birmingham was ready for a food retailer that did away with all single-use plastics was, in the view of their respondents, quite doubtful.
“Even our friends and family were worried that people wouldn’t want to give up the convenience of packaged goods,” says Pell.
What the couple did have, however, was a burning sense of mission. Pell, who grew up in nearby Lichfield, and Wong, from Blackpool, had become increasingly concerned about pollution – particularly in the oceans, where an estimated 8m metric tons of plastics end up every year. “It’s such a serious issue,” says Pell. “It’s one of those things where you can’t not do something.”
Pressing on, they launched a crowdfunding campaign on 3 December 2017, with 45 days to hit their target of £14,607 – the basic amount needed to get the shop up and running. Their timing was good: the final episode of Blue Planet 2, examining the impact of human activity on marine life, had just aired on BBC One and public awareness was skyrocketing. By mid-January, Pell and Wong had shot past their target, raising a total of £20,459.
The Clean Kilo opened in June 2018 in a spacious corner premises, originally a bank, in Digbeth, the arty quarter of central Birmingham. When I visit seven months later, the shop is as busy as you might expect on a wet weekday morning in mid-January. Customers drift in and out picking up fruit and veg, locally baked sourdough bread and loose coffee beans. One woman has a minor mishap with a gravity dispenser, spilling pulses onto the floor rather than into her reused plastic container, but otherwise things are running smoothly.”
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The farm
Mossgiel Farm, East Ayrshire
On 25 January 2019 – Burns Night – Bryce Cunningham posted a photo on Instagram of a glass milk bottle in a field backlit by pale winter sunshine. After quoting Robbie Burns on man’s dominion ruining nature’s social union, Cunningham, who runs Mossgiel Farm in East Ayrshire, neatly segued to the subject of single-use plastics, which he had spent the past year trying to eradicate at the farm.
“From today,” he wrote in the caption, “we are THE FIRST organic dairy in the country to … become 100% single-use plastic free in modern times, for all of our milk and cream packaging. It has been THE single most difficult thing we have done at Mossgiel.”
That’s saying something. Cunningham took over the farm in 2015, after his father and grandfather both died within the space of a year. He had spent a decade as a service team manager with Mercedes-Benz in the west of Scotland. “I had absolutely no interest in agriculture whatever,” he admits. “But when I went back to help things along and get the farm back on track, I ended up falling in love with it.”
Extending over 90 hectares in the upland town of Mauchline, south-west of Glasgow, Mossgiel is an easy place to fall in love with. But its picturesque location and romantic history – Burns lived and worked at Mossgiel in the 1780s – belie the difficulties of sustaining a farm here.
“Basically, I was left with this farm with 150 milking cows and I didn’t really know what I was doing,” says Cunningham, “and then the milk price collapsed. My first year in farming I lost £110,000. The bank said, ‘You’re no longer a supportable business,’ and asked for all their money back. We had to sell off a lot of assets’ – including 16 hectares of land and 75 cows – ‘There was no way out: it was either bankruptcy or do something different.’
That ‘something different’ involved going organic. When he returned to Mossgiel, Cunningham noticed how the lush pastures he remembered from childhood had been worn down by years of industrial farming. Determined to make a change, he stopped using industrial feed and fertilisers and put his herd on a grass-only diet, while investing in a pasteuriser to sell milk direct to the public. Initially it was difficult to find customers willing to pay a higher price for organic milk, but thanks to his legwork across the central belt of Scotland Cunningham now sells 14,000-16,000 litres a week. Until recently, all the milk and cream was going out in plastic cartons. ‘It was the cheapest, easiest, most hygienic way to do it,’ says Cunningham. ‘But I felt that, even as we were doing all this great work with the environment [by going organic], we were letting the side down by using single-use plastic. It was only when I watched Blue Planet 2 that I thought: ‘We really must do something about this now.’”
The restaurant
Spring, London
Skye Gyngell has a wry view of how she is perceived by the staff at her restaurant in central London. ‘Sometimes I think everyone says, “Oh God, it’s another initiative of Skye’s,”’ she says, rolling her eyes at herself and laughing. “But actually this latest one has been very easy – and it’s been really positive for us as a restaurant.”
In January 2018, Gyngell, who opened Spring at Somerset House in 2014, decided it was time to cut out all single-use plastics. At an event in London called Rubbish Talks, where Gyngell was speaking about food waste – her pre-theatre ‘Scratch’ menu at Spring makes use of misshapen fruit and veg and leftovers that would usually be thrown in the bin – she caught a talk by campaigner Siân Sutherland.
‘It was really shocking to me,’ Gyngell recalls of the talk, which addressed the overuse of plastic in the food world and the inadequacy of recycling to deal with the problem. ‘I went home and watched the documentary A Plastic Ocean on Netflix and slightly catastrophised the whole thing. I remember going to a supermarket after I’d seen it and walking around the aisles like a mad person going, “That’s plastic, that’s plastic …”’
She soon realised that her panic was counterproductive. ‘It becomes overwhelming, and when you’re overwhelmed you’re paralysed,’ she says. ‘And the fact is, plastic is a marvellous material. It has its place. The last thing you want to do is throw out all the plastic in your home.’
For a more constructive approach, Gyngell sought advice from Sutherland, who runs a campaign group in London called A Plastic Planet. ‘She said: “Let’s take five or six items in the restaurant and focus on single-use plastics.”’
Top of the list was clingfilm. ‘We worked out that we used 260 rolls of clingfilm a year,’ says Gyngell. The solution, which she admits ‘sounds a bit ridiculous’, was to go out and buy lids. ‘In this industry, saucepans usually come without lids, as they cost more. Instead, you just wrap your pot in clingfilm to bring it quickly to the boil. Same with gastros [stainless-steel pans used in food service]: we’d wrap them in clingfilm before putting them in the fridge.’”
View the whole story here: https://amp.theguardian.com/food/2019/apr/14/food-businesses-binning-single-use-plastic-environment