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In his regular feature, Denis the Dustcart talks about what waste reduction really means in the context of personal food shopping.

You can follow Denis on his  Facebook page  to keep up with information about Recycling issues.

#ZeroWasteWeek is an opportunity to think about what waste reduction really means in the context of personal food shopping.

Here’s an obvious statement for you: creating alternative types of waste doesn't count as reducing waste.

In other words, we aren't going to make a positive overall difference to the planet by exchanging one type of packaging material that does significant harm when littered in the environment for another that does significant harm before it even becomes a packet.

Our demand in recent years for companies to come up with solutions to single-use plastic packaging has seen a huge rise in the development and use of biodegradable or compostable alternatives.

Let’s not be too quick to applaud.

Paper, for instance, is held up to be better for the planet than plastic. But is it?

On the one hand it decomposes in nature whereas plastic has a physical legacy of dead wildlife. On the other, paper production and transportation uses significantly more fuel, water, energy and land than plastic production.

A single-use paper bag needs to be reused three times to lower its environmental impact to that of a single-use plastic bag used once. Whether it can be used again without falling apart is another matter.

A plastic bag-for-life requires four reuses in this equation, but it will remain strong enough to be reused dozens and dozens more times than the paper bag.

A reinforced paper bag – perhaps bleached – has a considerably larger environmental and ecological footprint than a plastic bag-for-life and so will need to be used more times before it breaks.

In Exeter we can get your plastic bags-for-life turned back into plastic sacks within the UK, so recyclability isn’t an issue – at least, not here.

Bioplastic bags can’t be recycled and are unlikely to break down in nature. Paper can be recycled and will break down if littered, of course, but again its environmental footprint comes down to the potential for it to be reused rather than simply recycled or broken down.

A good-quality woven plastic bag with canvas handles used weekly will probably remain useable until single-use bags – and where we used them – are just memories of a distant dystopian past.

We have to address this misconception that single-use packaging that will break down in nature is automatically better than plastic.

Which is better: something that is designed to be recycled over and over again or something that is designed to be composted or break down if littered? It depends on a) whether recycling infrastructure permits the recycling of the product, b) what the product can be recycled into, c) how many people can realistically be expected to have a compost bin and d) how we can prevent reckless disposal.

To my mind, if it's disposable and designed to break down rather than to be reused or recycled, it's at the bottom of the waste hierarchy. It is, quite literally, rubbish.

Just to be clear, I’m not advocating for plastic in single-use packaging. I’m suggesting that single-use packaging, regardless of what it’s made from, is the problem at the heart of the wider problem of waste.

By rushing to replace plastic packaging with single-use biodegradable alternatives such as card and paper, we are in danger of missing the point that there is so much harm caused by a product before it even becomes waste. The damage something does to the earth isn't caused only by its physical presence in the natural world through human negligence.

And of all the single-use items we produce, paper is one of the more harmful.

It may not be produced as a by-product of natural gas extraction like plastic, but making paper still uses a huge amount of fuel and results in greater direct energy-expenditure. Plastic is also lighter and therefore uses less fuel in transportation. In short, exchanging plastic for paper doesn’t mean we’re avoiding the consumption of fossil fuels.

If we’re talking about paper made from virgin material (and paper can only be recycled a very few times before its fibres become too short to pulp), then we’re talking about deforestation and, usually, the plantation of tree ‘farms’ – or ‘old wood being cut down and replaced with monocultures of non-indigenous species incapable of supporting the biodiversity essential for supporting life on earth’.

And recycled paper? We’re still talking about energy, water, chemicals, heat and fuel. Its carbon footprint is smaller than that of virgin paper and virgin plastic, but still bigger than that of recycled plastic.

All that being said, let’s make no mistake that plastic pollution is a tragedy we must put right. The fact that sea creatures exist should be reason enough for us to want to avoid harming them, but each is also an essential part of the earth’s ecosystem.

A creature that dies as a result of swallowing our plastic is a highly visible consequence of our poor behaviour, and we should be upset by this and we should do something about making sure it doesn’t keep happening. The environmental consequences of that death – of all the deaths – are less immediately visible, however, because they run deeper into the ecosystem.

And this is my point. The obvious problem isn’t the only problem. The seemingly obvious solution usually carries its own weighty set of problems.

Nothing we extract from the planet is ‘environmentally friendly’ or ‘planet-kind’.

The effort to change cannot be pinned solely on consumers, but those of us compelled by good intentions need nevertheless to continue to evolve our understanding of what good or harm our choices do.

‘Zero waste’, in the context of food shopping, is about personal reuse and a willingness to engage in the story of what we buy. In simple terms, it’s about filling containers we already have with goods that do the least harm.

Refilling is usually always cheaper and the products more ethical, and if you live in Exeter then you are lucky enough to have options when it comes to zero waste shops.

But society isn’t geared towards supporting the majority to make the choice to visit local shops. The odds are stacked against most people trying to cut down on packaging waste, because convenience is marketed as being essential to our ability to maintain a healthy life balance when in fact it’s integral to our remaining flat-out.

We have to believe that every one of us choosing to cut down on waste is making a difference to the planet, but we can’t make the mistake of assuming any kind of single-use packaging is necessarily better than any other.

If you can only get to a zero waste shop once in a while, it will still be a planet-positive thing to do. Just don’t go buying new tubs to fill if you already have some lurking in the back of your cupboard, even if it is a bit of an effort to get to them.