Max La Manna shares 6 simple ways to make milk with less waste, including oat milk and almond milk, to help reduce your plastic waste at home.
As a zero waste chef and advocate of mindful consumption, I’m always looking for ways of creating the lowest impact possible – consumption and waste wise. Whether it’s shopping at a local farmer’s market, walking instead of driving, turning the tap off when brushing our teeth – these all seem like small actions we can all make in our daily lives immediately. These small actions are a drop of water in a pond. They make a ripple effect and those ripples impact those around us and those around the world. You can have a cloudy day, but that doesn’t mean the sun isn’t shining.
When I started making those small changes towards living with less waste, I looked at what I was consuming daily. I made a consumption audit and devised a plan to shop for produce with no packaging, go to bulk stores and make my own products from scratch. This may seem like hard work, and of course it will be because it’s something you haven’t been doing all this time. Where do I begin and how do I start? Give it a try for a couple days, a few weeks or even a month and see your results. No one says you have to do this perfectly.
One product that I was consuming regularly that was on my audit was milk. Milk, in my generation, has always been packaged in plastic or tetra packs. When will the milkman or woman come back to our doorsteps and be the trend again? I needed to find my substitutions of plastic products more and more each day and needed to create that space between plastic and me.
I knew that if I’m drinking oat or almond milk from a packaged container, I then could make this milk myself from scratch. I then set off to a nearby bulk store for nuts, seeds and grains. Anything that I’ve seen on a shelf in a supermarket, I knew I could make myself.