The journey to plastic free - #2 First Steps

Our plastic free Journey - first steps

7th June 2020

So it’s been just over a year since Craft Box Club began as an in person craft workshop with a twist, going out to the people, testing ideas and seeing what worked. From the very first day there was no way that I was going to have plastic in the packaging. It just wasn’t happening. I found it really easy to find recycled kraft card boxes and paper fillers to do the job. In fact the brown kraft paper aesthetic has become part of the brand and I really love the look and feel of it.

The problem with “reusable”

I really wanted to bring people an alcohol inks kit. I’d discovered them through a brilliant artist friend of mine and they are just super colourful and fun! They are, however, a nightmare to do plastic free. I settled on using sturdy, reusable plastic pots. After all, the problem is single use plastic right? This will be fine, I told myself. We’ll use them again and again. It never happened! Nobody wants to separate all the kit out at the end of a messy evening of creativity. Everything ended up in the bin and even the ones I tried to recover got stained and was hard to clean without using pure alcohol. Not good for my hands or the environment. Sadly, even though it was super popular, alcohol ink had to go. I just hated throwing so much away that would sit there polluting the planet forever!

I couldn’t keep throwing away so much plastic!

100% plastic free - first try

I was lucky enough to be part of the wonderful Earth Living Festival in Reading. I wanted to set up a safe space for adults to play and be creative without fear. As the festival is all about living lightly on the planet I took up the challenge to make a completely plastic free kit. It was tough. Back then I didn’t have much craft experience or much time so I set about making a salt dough kit. You got 3 different doughs and each was scented with a different essential oil. I still think that’s pretty cool. As I needed to package up the salt dough I ordered hundreds of Vegware tubs. You’ve probably seen Vegware coffee cups and food tubs around a lot. I thought they’d be the perfect thing for my dough! They were advertised as biodegradable. Perfect? Nope! It turns out that they’re only biodegradable when they get industrially composted. So, great for big restaurants who industrially process their food waste. Not so great for me. It turns out that it can’t even be recycled! Really frustrating! It’s a minefield picking through all the different options. Even if your intentions are good, it’s easy to get it wrong.

Next time I’m going to talk about how it all started to come together and I began to produce the beautiful plastic free kits I send out today.

Want to join us on a plastic free, creative adventure?