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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In response to your follow up – getting rid of your plastic items IS creating more waste. The secret is to hold on to and reuse items for as long as they last, and choose sustainable products when you are in a position where you need to buy something. That way you minimize the impact of the things you have to buy, while also minimizing how much you have to buy.
The only reason storing food in a jar works the way it does is because you’re usually removing the use of a new zip-lock, If it’s new zip-lock or old jar, old jar is the waste-reducing option.
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