Reduce or reuse your waste at home

Shopping

We spend hours every month shopping. Buying food, clothes, presents and lots of other things we need or want.

Most of us will buy more than we need and end up throwing away food or not using the items we’ve paid for. Planning your shopping could save you money and time and help the environment.

Plan ahead

• Make a list. Plan what you want to buy and don’t be tempted by the two for one offers or price cuts.
• Plan a budget if you’re buying a special item. Cheaper items may be of a lower quality and break more quickly.
• Hire or borrow it. If you only need to buy something for a one-off task look at hiring or borrowing it instead.
• Buy in bulk if you know you use a lot of a product. Make sure you have somewhere to store it.

Change what you buy

Your buying choices can reduce waste and help create markets for long-life products or products with recycled content.

• Buy long-life. There are a lot of items designed for single use – disposable razors, cleansing wipes and individual sachets. See if you can buy something that will last for more than one use, for example an electric razor or one where you only have to replace the blades.
• Choose alternative presents. Buy an experience for your loved ones rather than a product. These gifts come as a card so there is very little packaging. Gifts like tickets for a show, adopting a polar bear or being a zoo keeper at London Zoo are wonderful presents to give.
• Choose recycled content. You can help create a market for recycled material by buying products such as kitchen rolls made from recycled paper. Recycled products do the same job as the non-recycled version and aren’t always more expensive; check the price difference in the shop.

Buy from other places

• We all have our favourite shops. We will go to the places we know and are familiar with but you can find things you want in shops you wouldn’t normally go in.
• Check out your local charity shops. We donate items to charity that we’ve hardly used because we don’t want them anymore and we want to help the charity. See what bargains you can buy and help charity at the same time.
• Find out if you have any wholesalers nearby. You might be able to buy in bulk from a shop you thought was only open to other businesses.