lowimpacthome.org

I’ve had a couple of people email me and ask when the plastic usage pictures and posts will be back.

Well let me give it to you straight…I am ashamed of my plastic usage so I don’t really wanna show you guys anymore.  But don’t fret, I will start back this weekend.

When I shopped at the granola store it was very easy for me to not buy plastic but now that I am shopping at my local big box grocery store, I can hardly find plastic free/less replacements for the things that I normally buy.

For example…when I shopped at Wild Oats they had great organic juices in glass bottles.  At Schnucks they have one or two types of juice in glass bottles but no one in my family would drink it and paying $4.50 for a pint seems a bit unreasonable.  So to not buy large quantities of plastic, we started buying canned juice from Juicy Juice.  It’s still expensive, not as expensive as the organic juice from Wild Oats but for concentrate it’s a bit pricey. But here is the problem…aluminum cans contain a layer of plastic on the inside so the contents don’t eat through the side of the can during their long journey to your table.  So whereas it’s better to buy less plastic there is still plastic involved.

At the granola store they would wrap my deli meats and cheeses in paper and at the grocery store they will not for any reason put the deli items into anything but their own plastic baggies.  I protested but after the look that I got from the deli manager, my protest did not go any further.  I can bring my own bags (oh! I have a story to tell about a BYOB convert!) but I can’t bring a plastic container of my own to put food into?  What’s up with that?  I’m sure that there is a Health Code or something but gesh, if I’m gonna spend $6 a pound for turkey I should get to have some say as to what I take it home in.  Anyway…I’ve tried to get away from eating luncheon meats totally but it seems that my 6 year old is on a PB&J protest (that I can buy in glass) and is refusing to eat peanut butter totally.  So at least for the rest of the summer I will have to buy the luncheon meat so that the poor child doesn’t starve. I do have one nice thing to say about the butchers at the meat counter at my local Schnucks, they have stopped using the plastic baggies to wrap the chicken and are only using butcher paper.  I guess my persistence with that department has won them over to the green side!

The one thing I can’t get away from is block or shredded cheese.  I know that even Beth at Fake Plastic Fish struggled with this issue too.  Since I don’t drink milk and most of my kids don’t either, we have to get our calcium from somewhere and cheese is it.  We have cheese on our baked spaghetti, tacos, enchiladas, chili dogs, turkey burgers and especially on our pizzas.  I can’t give it up but the worst part is I have no idea if the cows that produce this cheese are happy or not.  It’s definitely not organic like the milk and eggs that I buy so it’s even worse to buy it then I originally thought!  I’m going to the Farmer’s Market this weekend .  Yeah right, I keep saying that!  Pray that they have some happy cow cheese that I can start to substitute, at least then I would only be breaking one green rule.

Of course there is always the plastic wrapping from the turkey that I buy, but I don’t really count that as bad since I buy the turkey instead of beef since we all know what cattle does to our environment…don’t we?

There is a fine line that we walk between being green and living the way a normal consumer does.  I say it’s always worth doing!

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