I’m a crazy liberal hippie and very interested in low/no waste living. I can’t do everything, but I eat a plant-based diet, my kids wear cloth diapers, and some other stuff. I want to move our pantry toward lower waste, but all our food comes in disposable containers and wrappers. I see lots of low/no waste people reusing jars to store food but here’s where I get stuck in my thinking: if I buy a bag of lentils, it comes in a thin, disposable, plastic bag. If I put those lentils in a reused glass jar, am I not still throwing away the plastic bag they came in??
Follow up: isn’t getting rid of my plastic items to replace them with more sustainable ones creating a bunch of plastic waste? For example, if I ditch my current plastic Tupperware for glass mason jars, aren’t I just putting a bunch of plastic Tupperware in a landfill and creating demand for more mason jars? Which will eventually also end up in a landfill?
I’m sure I’m missing some key part of the argument, but it just kinda seems like creating a fashionably recyclable bubble around myself instead of making some kind of effective change in consumerism…
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While it’s nearly impossible to be completely no waste, I think the best approach is to be aware and keep making improvements, no matter how small.
A personal experience. My wife and I haven’t used straws in years. The server puts a couple of wrapped straws on the table and we didn’t use them. Yay us! Later we noticed that sometimes the server just threw them away with garbage when clearing the table so now we refuse them as the server puts them on the table so they aren’t trashed. It’s such a small thing that has zero impact if two people do this. But if two hundred, then two thousand, then two million do it, it starts to make a difference. Be aware and keep trying to improve.
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