Did you know that many town recycling programs will also take your cereal & cracker boxes? More and more of our food waste is renewable in some way. Heck, if it weren't for the fear of ID theft most of that junk mail could be tossed into the recycling. My town will take #1 & 2 plastic, newspapers, office paper & non-corrugated cardboard. Slick and I have been using recycled cloth grocery bags for about a year now and they work great.
This leaves out the dreaded #5 plastic (including most bottle caps), plastic bags & most of the boxes from Amazon.com. So, what to do?
We've cut out plastic bag use by 70-80%. I try to refuse bags at retail stores for small, easy to carry items. Unfortunately, I still haven't figured out how to carry produce without little plastic bags. I've also noticed that many disposable containers (cherry tomatoes, hummus) are #5 plastic. This got me thinking about packaging. Do people ever consider the packaging in a purchase? Should we?
I may give it a try. I'll let you know how it goes.
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5 comments:
My township uses Recycle Bank.
I should do a full post on them sometime. But the summary is:
1. They take glass, paper, cardboard, etc (including phonebooks)
2. They take #1, #2, and #7 plastics.
3. It all goes in a 94 gallon rolling trashcan-like thing (in light blue)
4. They pay me for it (in local store coupons).
Can't beat that with a stick...and my township itself has a bulk collection of cardboard if you need to get rid of moving boxes or the like...and there is always freecycle
BTW, take-out containers should be #6 and bottle caps are most likely not #5.
See this link for more details.
Also, check some local supermarkets. Almost all the ones around here take plastic bags...and you could invest in some canvas ones, they are cheap (like $0.99) and have lasted us 6 months so far.
Our curbside recycling takes plastics 1-5, paperboard, cardboard, office paper, newspaper and glass. In addition most of the schools around here have drop-off bins for paper that they get money for. Everything except the corrugated cardboard goes into the same blue bags. This creates a catch-22. The grocery store encourages people to use their own bags (and I agree with this), but they give out free blue plastic bags to put recycling in... so every so often you have to take store bags or you can't get rid of the recycling.
There's some small interest here in bins for curbside recycling, to replace the blue bags, but it hasn't caught on yet.
As for what to do about small plastic grocery bags... you could bring your own paper bags, if you can't find small canvas ones you like. Re-use them until they fall apart and then recycle... not the best answer, perhaps, but better than plastic (probably).
And I've found that more stores (not just grocery stores anymore) are starting to be willing to work with you providing your own bags. They look at me a little funny in Target sometimes, but they use the bag I give them, so what do I care?
I use my own canvas grocery bags. I'm wondering about things like green beans and apples. Do you use the little bags for that or do you use your own bag?
Here's the only thing I could find with google...and only 2 minutes of effort...check the last post in the forum.
I'll try to remember to ask at my CSA tomorrow.
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