Families
Less plastic at home, without the guilt
A calculator that shows its working, a 30-day challenge that forgives missed days, and conversation cards your kids will actually use on you.
Families do not need another list of 100 things to feel bad about. You need to know which three things in your kitchen and bathroom make the most difference, roughly what they add up to, and how to make the swap stick when life is busy. That is what these tools do. The calculator prints every weight it uses and where it came from, so you can trust the number (and so your children can check it, which they will). The 30-day challenge is one swap a week, with a real total at the end. And if your child comes home from school with a “Convince your parents” card, we are sorry, and also not sorry.
Start here
- Five minutes: the calculatorEnter how many bottles, bags, cups and packets you use in a normal week. Get kilograms a year and what each swap would save. The three biggest lines for most households are drinks bottles, produce bags and snack packets, so start there.
- Thirty days: the Swap ChallengeWeek one, bottle to refillable. Week two, bag to reusable (and actually bringing it). Week three, snack packets to a big pack and tubs. Week four, cup to keep-cup. Tick each day; if you miss one, tick the next.
- Ten minutes: read the story together“Where does my plastic go?” for ages 5 to 7 follows Bob the Bottle on four journeys; the ages 8 to 11 version answers the question every child asks: if we recycle it, why is it still a problem?
- One card a week: let them convince youTwelve cards with a kid-sized ask, one checked fact, and a family action.
What actually makes a difference
- Reuse beats recycling. Only about 9% of the world’s plastic waste is recycled (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)). The plastic you never buy is the plastic you can be sure about.
- A bag for life only helps if it lives. It needs to be used at least 4 times to beat a thin bag on climate impact; a cotton bag needs 131 uses. The trick is not buying more bags, it is putting them where you will find them. (UK Environment Agency life-cycle assessment (LCA), 2011)
- Swap the heavy thing, not the tiny thing. A drinks bottle is about 10 g of plastic; a straw is 0.4 g. One refill bottle used every school day avoids about 190 bottles a year. (European Commission, 2018)
- Small nudges work at scale. England’s bag charge cut single-use bag sales at the main supermarkets by 98% between 2014 and 2025-26. A “new-bag jar” does the same job at home.
- It is fixable. The UN estimates reuse, recycling and material swaps could cut plastic pollution 80% by 2040 with what already exists, and reuse is the biggest lever (UN Environment Programme (UNEP), 2023). Your kitchen is part of the reuse lever.
Honest notes
- Your household number counts the packaging you handle. The plastic used to grow, make and ship what you buy is usually larger and mostly out of your hands, which is why we also help kids write to companies and schools. Treat your number as “the part I can change this month”.
- If a swap costs more or is not sold where you live, skip it. This is about what you can change, not about guilt.
- Nothing you type into the calculator leaves your browser except the totals sent for the calculation, which are not stored.
Pick one thing. Start Monday.
Run the calculator, choose the heaviest line, and start the Swap Challenge with the kids. Count again in a month.
Want to do more beyond your home? Help the cause lists groups to support, drop-off points for hard-to-recycle items, and citizen-science projects the whole family can join.
Put it on the fridge. The main points of this page on one sheet. Every figure in it names its source, and the same figures are on this site with links to the original studies. All free printables.