SANITY SAVER: Reduce and Reuse

I started using yogurt and margarine containers to organize my drawers and things because where I live they cannot be recycled.  We can only recycle #1 Pete plastics.  That eliminates A LOT of other plastics.  We previously lived in town that recycled everything!  From kitchen scraps to styrofoam.  We only threw out 2 grocery sized bags of waste a week!  And at the time we had two cats, a dog and our first born.  Talk about recycling!  So to go from that to throwing out laundry detergent plastics, yogurt plastics, margarine, pudding and apple sauce plastics.  That's a lot of plastic!  And they fill the garbage bags very quickly.  We were having a tough go trying to keep to our curb side limit of only two full black garbage bags per week.  We were losing our sanity.  We needed a solution to stop the garbage!

Reusing peanut butter containers to hold play-dough

So what's a good Mom to do?

Since we couldn't recycle, I turned to the other two Rs: reduce and reuse.

Reduce:  This one was hard.  It meant buying less and buying differently.  I now look at packaging very closely.  If I can't recycle it, there's a good chance I'm not buying it.  I stopped buying individually packaged puddings and apple sauces.  Now I buy pudding in a box, and make it myself, and buy jarred apple sauce.  It's a little more inconvenient but as a bonus it saves money.  I've stopped buying granola bars to avoid all the packaging.  I shop at our local bulk food store which saves some packaging but they still use plastic bags I can't recycle.  I looked into buying liquid detergent packaged in cardboard by Seventh Generation  but couldn't justify the price difference (for my non-recyclable plastic detergent I was paying less than $2 a jug) so I'm now looking at making my own detergent.  I will be blogging about those experiences in April or May. 

Reuse: This one is easy.  I love reusing.  I have no problems with second-hand or hand-me-down anything.  Reusing or re-purposing is second nature.  I reuse as many plastic containers as I can (as seen in this post.)  We began composting but we still don't quite have the hang of it.  I'm sure with practice we'll figure it out.

Unfortunately there are only so many things that I can use a yogurt container for.  Many still end up in the garbage and I can't find alternatives for these products.  It saddens me that companies have such a strong focus on marketing and not much on packaging.  I would like to send out a shout of "Thank you!" to the Fisher Price  toy company.  Every toy my son has received created by their company has had packaging that is 100% recyclable! Even the little twist ties are made of cardboard!  Also it's not a huge struggle to get the darn thing open (nothing is worse than your child wanting to play with a toy but can't because it's trapped behind an impenetrable fortress of plastic!)  Clearly I am impressed by their efforts.  Well done Fisher Price! I wish more companies would follow your lead.

What do you do to reduce, reuse or recycle?

Does it save you time, money or give you peace of mind?

Please leave a comment or send me an email.