UUCE – 40 Days

We agreed to save all food containers/wrappers for 40 days. This is not a project that should be undertaken by someone with limited space! The first picture shows what we accumulated in spite of having a household of only two, virtually never eating in restaurants, doing most of our cooking from scratch, and preparing meals that are heavily vegetarian. Breakfast and snacks seem to provide the bulk of our wrappers. Clearly, a future goal should be more baking and less purchasing of prepared cookies and crackers. We’d like cereal/cracker companies to help by totally filling their boxes, providing a choice for larger containers, and using recyclable materials for sealing liners–or, even better, combining the box and liner as one item.

We wondered what proportion of our food wrappers were recyclable. The second picture shows the result–items on the left are recyclable within our local village, and items in the bag on the right are trash. Trash is mostly plastic that is not coded for recyclability. The food producers are doing a fairly good job (if this material is truely reclycled at the recycing center). Still, they could do better, as it seems to us that many of the items headed for a landfill could have been replaced by recyclable materials.

We are happy that the 40 days are over, and we can clear this stuff out of the garage!

Barbara Sugden & Ron Vargason

editors note: This was originally posted as a comment to the Share Your 40/40/40 Story page.  I’ve moved it here in the hopes of starting a dialogue.  - Melissa

No plastic bags! That was on of my objectives. No problem I thought. So after about 100 trips back to my car afte standing in line to check out and remembering that the cloth bags were still in the car I am almost remembering every time. But how about shopping at other types of stores? That’s different. So it’s – shop, leave stuff in my cart, go out to car and get the bags, come back to find that some eager employee has unloaded all the stuff I just “bought”. Then shop once again.

I have heard that doing the cloth bag thing really isn’t that big a deal in the larger picture, but let me tell you, it’s a big deal for me – with my mind targeted on why I’m shopping and for what, I am really challenged to bring in the bags.

Anyone else running into challenges with their “promises”?

- Jane Kimball

Great news! We have reached 49 participants – well over our goal of 40. But, we still would love to have more people join us on this adventure. Please see the posts below to learn about the 40/40/40 challenge, and then sign up with your own commitment here.  Come join us!