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I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen some better product packaging out there. Some soap companies are offering pump bottle refills in plastic bags (which take less energy to create and recycle than the bottles). Some food companies are using foil and paper instead of plastic and plastic. Some household product companies are foregoing any sort of packaging, opting for a hang-tag rather than a bag or box.

But it’s still easy to find hard clamshell packaging. You know, the kind where you’re likely to injure yourself just trying to get it open. The picture above shows how, after working at this thick, rounded plastic showerhead package with scissors, nearly removing my thumb in the process, I’d given up. My partner had a bright idea: use our reciprocating saw. It worked!

Have you had any run-ins with packaging?

As I munched my lunch today I was reminded of all of the waste that comes with our everyday lives. I bought a yogurt at a coffee shop, and that yogurt container’s gonna have to make the trek to the recycling plant. I received an interesting note from Canadian company TerraCycle describing how they’re working to “upcycle” waste from common single-use packaging in school lunches.

TerraCycle, in partnership with Kraft Canada, has started a “Brigade” system pays schools and non-profit organizations two cent per package to collect non-recyclable food packaging. TerraCycle has sponsorships to collect Kool-Aid Jammers, Del Monte beverages, Mr. Christie’s Snak Paks and other Mr. Christie cookies and crackers, and Back to Nature nuts and trail mixes.

I don’t have kids, so it’s easy for me to say that it would be best to avoid buying lunch foods that come in non-recyclable packaging. But I can see that, like most problems, a variety of solutions are required, and upcycling waste into other products isn’t a bad one. TerraCycle says that drink pouches will be sewn into durable containers such as tote bags and pencil cases, while cracker wrappers will be fused together into sheets of waterproof fabric, which then can be made into umbrellas, shower curtains, backpacks and placemats.

To sign up for the TerraCycle program, click here.

Have you ever bought or made something constructed with reused something else?

I’ve had a few things to say in previous posts about avoiding plastic bags while grocery shopping. As I hit my local market last night, it occurred to me that I could shop differently to avoid a lot more plastic. It just means being open to different choices.

You’re going to be thinking “Well, duh!” here, but it was a bit of an Aha moment for me when I thought I’d just look around the veggie section for things that aren’t packaged. So if I want tomatoes, sometimes I’m going to buy tomatoes on the vine, not grape tomatoes (pesky plastic boxes). And if I want mushrooms, I’m going to skip button mushrooms and go for cremenies or portobellos, and put them in a produce bag or paper bag, not buy a little blue box of them covered in plastic wrap. The store has lots of choices, from celery in a plastic sleeve and naked celery, temping Californian berries in plastic boxes or loose local apples, to even cheeses in paper wrapping or cheeses in plastic and meat in butcher paper instead of on foam trays (wrapped in plastic, sometimes two layers!).

It isn’t always easy to shop plastic-free, since sometimes there just aren’t any good choices, particularly at smaller stores that shrink-wrap everything to try to preserve freshness (and therefore reduce waste). Food packaging so quickly becomes recycling or garbage, it’s great for the earth if we can find ways to do without it.

How are you reducing the waste you bring home? Have you swapped one food for another to avoid waste?

While mixing up ingredients for Homemakers magazine’s Fresh Tomato Lasagna (mmm, ripe tomatoes and fresh basil, my favourite combination!) last week, I opened my drawer of too-rarely-used baking dishes and mixing bowls to pick a dish for the wet ingredients. If the recipe isn’t too large in volume, I pick my mom’s mom’s glass Pyrex mixing bowls (stamped “Made in Canada” on the bottom), bowls she used to make many many dishes, bowls with some light scoring from all the baking whipped to form within, bowls that are thick and heavy and hard to break.

Sure, I could get a set of matching plastic or ceramic bowls for a surprisingly small sum at any home store. They would be lovely. They would get used. They would chip, crack and eventually be tossed out. But grandma’s bowls stood up to everything she could dish out, so they’ll have no problem with my occasional baking whims. If anything, I’ll be hunting around antique shows (including the Odessa Antique Show, on west of Kingston this weekend) for a larger bowl to go with grandma’s set.

Do you have a favourite kitchen item, at home or at the cottage, that has stood the test of time?

With the municipal workers strike in Toronto finally over, it’s finally garbage day in Toronto. In the first week the city is taking recycling and green bin (compost) material; next week they’ll take garbage and yard waste. As I walked to work this morning, I chatted with a few neighbours about how they dealt with the five-week strike. Most noted that they had much more recycling material than garbage. As I peeked in the clear bags (recycling overflow) that lined the streets in my neighbourhood, I noticed an interesting phenomenon: while one bag often had a lot of uncompressed boxes and cans in it, subsequent bags often had flattened boxes and cans, and there seemed to be fewer glass bottles and rigid plastic packages. Yes, Toronto, I think we learned a few things about how to handle our waste and what not to bring home.

One woman told me that a couple of her neighbours were sheepish about their lack of recycling (and bags of garbage) and asked if she would put  one of her bags of recycling in front of their house. Talk about keeping up appearances!

Here is my recycling bin, waiting for the truck. I did have some extra recycling, shown here in the bag my new rain barrel came in. I could have held it until the next cycle, but it did feel good to purge out all of the waste along with my neighbours. (Besides, fruit flies found something among the recycling.) My green bin was almost full, but I’m happy to say that we still have lots of room in our garbage bin. 

Did you do OK through the garbage strike?

Have you changed your mind about something you were going to bring home – knowing that you would have to dispose of it, or its packaging, later?

Yesterday’s post on favourite reuseable water bottles seemed pretty popular, so I thought I’d get the discussion going on reuseable food containers. I would rather not store my food in plastic containers, particularly if I intend to heat it up. I love these stainless-steel containers available at Grassroots. They come in a couple of sizes, and they are water tight thanks to the silicone lid liner and metal clamps, so you can bring your leftover saag paneer for lunch without worrying about unleashing a green, cheesy mess in your purse. Of course I have to dump the food onto a plate to microwave it, but I can handle that.

I also have a glass lunch box from Ikea, outfitted with a silicone seal to connect the lid. I love it because it’s microwaveable, but unfortunately Ikea doesn’t offer these anymore.

How do you take your lunch to work, or pack snacks to go?

As I noted in my earlier post about bottled water, it seems there is a link between education and deciding to consume bottled water. And as I’ve learned in reading health research for Homemakers magazine, a reuseable bottle isn’t a reuseable bottle. While the bottles that bottled water comes in are safe to drink from, they become less so over many refills, since it’s hard to clean the narrow-necked bottles thoroughly. And, of course, there’s the concern over the health effects of long-term exposure to bisphenol A (BPA) from some types of plastic food and drink containers.

Luckily there are lots of great reuseable water bottle options on the market. I really like stainless-steel bottles, since it’s a durable, food-safe material I can scrub away at and put in the dishwasher as well. I have an “Otterbottle”, which is from an Alberta-based company (although the bottles are manufactured in China), and I also have a larger SIGG bottle, made in Switzerland, which is aluminum, made with a can liner that’s BPA and phthalate free. I’ve even seen glass bottles shaped like plastic water bottles!

What’s your favourite way to tote refreshment on the go?

I was looking for some statistics on Canada’s bottled water consumption recently, and I came across an interesting fact.
According to Statistics Canada, while there is there is a strong relationship between wealth and drinking bottled water, and there is also a strong relationship between having a university education and having wealth, there is a lower likelihood of drinking bottled water in the home IF members of the household have a university degree. The StatCan report says, “It is possible that university graduates are more aware of the environmental issues surrounding bottled water. They may also be more sceptical of the claims that bottled water is a healthier choice than tap water.”

I hope that this shows, at minimum, that education can make a difference in helping people make better choices, be they about packaging and waste, habitat preservation, the global effects of burning fossil fuels… or any other important issue.

Did you have a turning point in your environmental thinking, where learning something new made you change what you do?

I had a chance to watch the documentary Addicted to Plastic over the weekend. Although I had heard about the areas of the ocean that tend to accumulate plastic, it was fascinating (and scary) to see just how much plastic was in the area of the Pacific shown in the film (especially compared to the relatively insignificant amount of plankton in the same area). It was scary to see just how much plastics have infiltrated our food chain — the film shows a dissections of dead gulls from a beach in Holland; their stomachs are loaded with bits of plastics, and shows how toxins from plastics make their way into the fish we eat.

I appreciated that the film doesn’t lay blame on society for becoming reliant on plastics, showing that we just got caught up in its convenience without seeing the looming issues down the road. It seems that if we can contain plastics, largely by avoiding convenience plastics and reusing as much of the material as we can for new things, we’ll really reduce the severity of the plastics pollution problem. Beyond that, Addicted to Plastic shows many case studies of people who are doing a terrific job of recycling plastic into new goods (such as Interface carpets), or creating plastics from plant material such as corn.

My bet: We’ll be mining old landfills for plastics, metals and other valuable materials within 15 years.

Do you think you could live without plastic?

At the end of a restaurant meal, I always feel torn when there’s a good portion of food left on my plate and the server asks, “Would you like to take that home?” By taking food home, I make my money go further, I reduce waste and I probably eat less per meal, too (not a bad thing for me). But on the other hand, I know a lot of cities don’t recycle foam. Even if they do, it’s made with petroleum and will never break down in landfills – not something I want to support.

By the time I’ve thought this through, the server usually gets a little impatient. But a couple of weeks ago, out dining in our new neighbourhood in Toronto, the night was a little slow. So when the gentleman asked, “Would you like that to go?” I explained my dilemma, expecting to get a frustrated sigh in return. But instead, he offered me tin foil as an alternative to a foam box. Hey, that’s something that I can recycle — or even reuse if I’m being thrifty.

Have you noticed any decent foam alternatives when you get your meals to go?