Check this article from the Toronto Star. It's worth a full read. Reporter Tyler Hamilton cuts right to our wasteful lunch habits in the first paragraph. Plastic utensils, styrofoam to-go boxes, paper bags all languishing in the garbage, destined for the landfil because we're too lazy to pack our lunch.
Since I work in Manhattan, I started bringing my lunch because I was hemorrhaging cash by buying everyday. Now I get the added bonus of producing less waste with my PBJ along with the $10/day saved.
But it's not just lunch leftovers that are causing our landfils to overflow. It's pretty much everything we buy. Think about it - is all that flashy packaging really necessary? NO. So it's worth it to write a letter or call the companies that you purchase from regularly and complain about the packaging. Chances are, all that plastic and styrofoam is costing them a lot of money as well. As Hamilton puts it, "Kids toys are the worst – an endless struggle with plastic film, polystyrene foam and plastic ties, all tightly glued, stapled and knotted to a recyclable cardboard structure that's so mangled in the end it never reaches a blue box." He even goes one step further to suggest that legislation to limit the percentage of packaging in product volume should be considered. And I think that's awesome.
If you're looking for something to write your representative about, why not start with this?
2 comments:
"If you subscribe to your favorite magazines instead of buying them from a newsstand, you'll get the convenience of delivery and will save 75 percent or more off the newsstand price. Sixty percent of most magazines at the newsstand aren't sold and have to be hauled off to the trash dump--a waste of time, money, and energy." ~The Green Book
Good point. However, people who subscribe to magazines aren't purchasing them at the newsstand, so they're the ones who are leaving them there to be thrown away. Nevermind the manpower and fuel costs of delivering magazines across the country.
Another reason why I love online content.
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