In my twenties I was introduced to the joys of Asian-style cooking in a mild steel wok over a flame (in those days it was a kero primus!) and of course the perfect condiment: soy sauce. I fooled around with the brands available but came to like the Japanese soy sauce brand ‘Kikkoman’ and really haven’t deviated too far from that since, and for a long time we would buy it by the one litre plastic bottle, and go through it quickly.
Back in the day
Fast forward some 40 odd years and things have changed, due to a family member’s health issue our usage of soy sauce has dropped quite a bit. One effect of this has been that the current one litre bottle has been hanging around for quite a while and since I never stored it in the fridge (ever) its flavour and saltiness has been getting stronger and stronger.
Coincidentally with all of this, we have been working on reducing our plastic waste.
The current 1 litre plastic bottle of soy sauce was also about to run out. The obvious answer to both issues (using less soy sauce and reducing our plastic waste) was to get in one of the 150ml glass Kikkoman soy sauce bottles, thus keeping the soy sauce fresher and reducing the amount of plastic waste in this case. So, I picked one up and the empty one litre plastic bottle went into the recycle bin.
That is when things got interesting! I opened the new glass soy sauce bottle and there was a plastic seal, and the red lid was also plastic. When I weighed them, they added up to about 10 grams. It was at this point I was kicking myself for not weighing the 1 litre plastic container to compare. Just to see what would happen I asked the question on the net, and it came up!!!!
It seems that a 1 litre Kikkoman soy sauce plastic bottle weighs 33 grams!
Anyway, to move on with the story, to replace the 1 litre of soy sauce would require a bit under 7 of the 150ml glass ones in terms of the volume of soy sauce, so to do the math:
The 1 litre soy sauce bottle provides 33 grams of recyclable plastic, the equivalent amount of soy sauce bought in the smaller bottles would produce 70 grams of small plastic bits that are not easy to recycle.
Sometimes the most obvious fix is not the best at least in terms of plastic waste reduction.
But of course that was not the end of it, and when I posted about it online, a lady suggested that I refill the glass bottles with soy sauce from a packaging-free shop, which would mean no plastic waste at all.
I did have some reservations, though. While there is a packaging-free shop not that far from us, they do not keep their 5 litre bulk soy sauce bottle in the fridge and I had no way of telling what the original brand of it was. The only way to decide was to get a bit and do a blind taste test. So I got a small amount from the shop and did a blind taste test by getting two steamed gyoza and getting Linda to apply the soy sauce. I figured it would be easy to pick between the two and the new Kikkoman stuff would come up trumps, but in the event it wasn’t! I couldn’t tell them apart so that worked for me.
The only point I made to myself was to keep hold of the little plastic seal in the top of the bottle so I didn’t get soy sauce everywhere when coming home after a refill.
There is always an answer in the end!
