Plastic Round-Up

For the month of February I committed to bringing less plastic into my home. I found that most of our waste is from the kitchen- we be grocery shopping! Here is the plastic that I collected:

95 produce stickers (and I am pretty sure that this is not all of them - it’s bananas!)

23 non-food bags (my homemade lotion bar metal tins come individually wrapped in plastic bags- ah!)

15 food bags - frozen food, nuts, dates

14 produce twist ties with tag

5 glass bottle seal wrappers

3 veggie broth cartons

3 rings from sparkling water caps

3 plastic bread bag clips (from bags of produce)

3 mesh bags (lemons)

2 tofu containers

2 vitamin bottles

2 prepackaged produce bags

1 plastic lined paper bag

1 kids toy watch band & cover

1 floss container

1 ketchup bottle

1 light bulb package

Plastic packaging from food items.

Plastic packaging from an assortment of non-food items.

Of these 175 plastic items 10 of them were recyclable through my city’s recycling pick-up program (that leaves 165 items for the landfill!). The majority of the items included no number indicating the grade of plastic so it was hard to tell if they were even recyclable.

The items that were recyclable.

We practiced a lot of discipline to reduce our plastic to this. It meant eating less of some things and avoiding some things all together. We (Isis) ate way less frozen french fries this month. We had less smoothies since the majority of our ingredients we buy frozen. We avoided potato chips, snack bars, pasta and Trader Joes (yo why do they have to wrap EVERYthing in plastic?).

It was hard, particularly around price. The co-op and other grocery stores sale nuts in bulk which is great but they were $4-$5 more a pound verses the ones prepackaged in plastic bags. WHY? Medjool dates in bulk are $8.49/lb and prepackaged they are $7/lb. We eat A LOT of nuts and dates!

I shared some tips on how we reduced our plastic on the Sustaianbly Jennifer facebook page and will continue to do more. Next focus will be the bathroom.