Packaging and painting

In our mission to sell up and build an eco house, the staircase has now been painted (photos here), a new door has been hung and may need to be replaced again and various other jobs are underway. We're all working quite hard, in fits and starts, in between being overwhelmed by how much there is to do. Every now and again one or other of us (usually me, of course) can be found stumbling around muttering: "Where do I start?" or "What was I doing?" or "Where did I put - ?" and another one or other of us gently reassures the person and guides them back to the task in hand. Chips are being cooked a lot, and honey sandwiches made by way of sustenance for the workers. People keep turfing unused bits of furniture out of their bedrooms and magically unearthing baskets full of clothes we never knew we had.

In and amongst this hive of activity (by our standards), after the car tax reminder landed on the doormat (about which a tiny bit more here) and I'd seen the blog comments about plastic bags here, we got to thinking about packaging.

Because we don't do all that much with our car on the whole. It takes us to home ed meetings, but a taxi could do that (cheaper than a bus). It gets us to the supermarket, but we could shop online instead. And it takes us to the recycling centre. We were struggling to work out how we could do without this.

We are six people: we buy a lot of food. Most of this is packaged in the usual assortment of bits of plastic which are mostly what fills up our black bin bags. We used to persevere with the bin men, but their determined efforts to fill the bin with stagnant water mixed up with new black bags ground us down in the end. Also the people who collect things to recycle allow you one relatively tiny black boxful which must be stacked just so and we produce three times as much, even if we could be bothered to stack it just so. We have no wheely bins here. No litter fines either though.

So we take it all ourselves in the car. But the government wants to charge us £180 a year for running the car on top of all the other car-running costs and will probably soon start charging us for using the recycling centre too, so we've started wondering whether we can do without the packaging instead.

(Convoluted thinking? Nous?!)

This is a very long way of me asking: has anyone managed to cut down on the packaging they buy? For big families? And if so, how? I'm thinking about buying in bulk from somewhere like Suma, which is only a few miles away, though we'd still need a car to get there unless they do very cheap local deliveries. We could buy the boys' meat from the local butcher instead of the supermarket. More expensive maybe, but maybe not if it saves us from needing to keep the car on the road. I can't think what else we buy that's packaged, but I might collect it all in a pile and take photos sometime, so I can work it out. Or keep a list or something.

The ideal thing would be to take our own food containers somewhere to be filled. But that means driving.

Is there a gap in the market for mobile shops again? That would make sense.