We're an eco-company, not terribly fond of plastic, but we sell plastic picnicware: recycled plastic, and plastic made from sugarcane waste.

"Plastic-free" has become synonymous for "eco-friendly", and after decades of images of turtles tangled in carrier bags — and, more recently, headlines about microplastics turning up everywhere from Antarctic ice to our own bloodstreams — who can blame anyone for wanting plastic out of their lives entirely? But the plastic-free label sometimes hides a less green reality.

The problem with "eco" disposables

Walk into any supermarket before a bank holiday and you'll find shelves of paper plates, bamboo bowls, palm leaf platters and "compostable" cups. They look wholesome. Most of them have three problems.

1/ They're used once. This is the big one, and no clever material gets around it. Every disposable plate — paper, bagasse, palm leaf, whatever — has to be grown, harvested, processed, moulded, packaged and shipped, all for about fifteen minutes of sandwich duty. A reusable plate spreads that footprint over hundreds of picnics. Almost any reusable item, in almost any material, beats almost any single-use item after a handful of uses. The material is a detail; the disposability is the problem.

2/ "Compostable" means "compostable in industrial facilities". These are facilities running at high temperatures that break products down in around twelve weeks. The trouble is, most of us can't send our picnic waste to one. Councils generally won't take compostable packaging in food waste collections, it can't go in your recycling (it contaminates it), and most of it won't break down properly in a home compost heap. So in practice, that compostable plate usually goes in the general waste bin and off to landfill or incineration.

3/ They travel a long way to be thrown away. Something that surprised me when I went looking: almost nobody manufactures disposable picnicware in the UK, and certainly no one in the UK manufactures picnicware from recycled materials.

Palm leaf plates come from India. The compostable bagasse tableware is made in Asia. Even paper plates are now largely imported — and here's another twist: paper plates generally can't be made from recycled paper, because food-safety rules around inks and residues in the recycled paper stream mean plates and cups need virgin fibre. Every "eco" paper plate is freshly made from trees, shipped halfway around the world, used once, and binned.

None of this makes disposables evil – I'm running the risk of sounding a bit preachy again, I'm aware of that. I was just very surprised that we couldn't get paper plates made out of recycled paper in the UK. I guess using it for loo roll or for plant pots is different from using it to contain food. I wonder how much nasty ink was eaten in times gone by when fish and chips were wrapped in old newspapers? Bleh.

So, "plastic-free" and "planet-friendly" are not always the same thing, however natural the beige fibre looks. With that context, here's why reusable plastic can be one of the better picnic choices going.

Our recycled range pulls plastic out of the waste stream. The Al Fresco and Adventure plates, cups and cutlery we stock are made from 100% recycled, food-grade polypropylene — and food-grade recycled plastic is hard to come by. Most recycled plastic ends up in fence posts and decking because getting it clean and consistent enough to eat off is difficult and expensive. Every one of these plates is made from plastic that already existed — yoghurt pots and the like that would otherwise have been landfilled or downcycled. Buying recycled is recycling; the kerbside box is just the collection round.

Our sugarcane range avoids new fossil plastic in the first place. Our modular picnic set is made from a by-product of sugar production — the waste left over once sugarcane has been processed for sugar, not a crop grown specially for the purpose (which is what sets it apart from bamboo plastics and suchlike). Worth being clear-eyed about what this material is, though: it's chemically very similar to ordinary plastic, not some entirely different substance. The advantage isn't that it behaves differently in the world — it's still durable, still needs recycling at end of life, still shares the handling advice above — but that no new oil has been drilled to make it, and it puts a farming waste stream to good use.

Whichever range you choose, the point is the same: these are durable, dishwasher-safe pieces that shrug off being dropped on a gravel path. Use them fifty times, a hundred times, and the footprint per picnic dwindles to nearly nothing. And because they're a single, known plastic, both ranges can be recycled again at the end of their (long) life. Durable plastic isn't the plastic problem. The plastic crisis is overwhelmingly a single-use crisis: packaging, films, bottles, cutlery, designed to be waste from the moment they're made.

To be honest, our recycled plastic range isn't our best seller. Many of us are trying to avoid plastic in our lives. But we'd rather sell you one set of plates that lasts ten years than a stack of imported beige ones every summer — even if the beige ones would be better for business. The most eco-friendly plate isn't necessarily plastic-free. It's the one you don't throw away.

What about microplastics, though?

Microplastics are everywhere — in our water, our soil, our food, and inside us. Researchers have found associations between microplastic exposure and problems including inflammation and gut health effects, but the scientific position, including from bodies like the European Food Safety Authority, is that the overall impact on human health remains largely unknown and hard to quantify, partly because we don't yet know the doses at which effects occur.

What we do know is that not all plastic exposure is equal. The particles you're most likely to ingest come from heat and abrasion: microwaving food in plastic, pouring boiling water into a plastic cup, scrubbing scratched or worn plastic with a scourer, or leaving food sitting in plastic containers for days. Cutting food on a plastic board is a bigger source than eating off a plastic plate.

The type of plastic matters too. Our recycled picnicware — like the Al Fresco and Adventure ranges, and the sugarcane-based set — is made from polypropylene (plastic #5), which is BPA-free and one of the more heat-stable, chemically inert plastics used in food contact. BPA and phthalates, the chemicals that tend to make headlines, are mostly associated with other plastic types (like polycarbonate and PVC), not polypropylene.

If you want to go plastic-free, we have our enamelware that will elevate any picnic. But for lightweight, cheap and easy, we have a useful range of recycled plastic products.

Happy Picnic-ing!