BBC journalist Christine Jeavans is giving up plastic for the whole of August. She will not be buying or accepting anything which contains plastic or is packaged in plastic.

Before the challenge, Jeavans collected a month’s worth of my plastic waste, which amounted to 603 items! England alone throws away 58 billion items - 1.5 million tonnes - of household plastic packaging a year, according to the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) and it’s growing annually by 2-5%.

Plastic waste

Jeavans writes that the “Durable, versatile, lightweight, hygienic, cheap and strong: synthetic plastic is arguably one of the most useful inventions of the last century… It is essential in medical equipment, technology and thousands of devices which have increased our standard of living…. But those very same attributes of durability and cheapness make plastic one of the most pervasive forms of waste on the planet.”

Keep up with her blog here.