Beth sez it better...

... than I could. She's a plastic reduction pro. Please stop reading me and go read THIS

Phone Call to Best Foods

In an ongoing effort to reduce the amount of plastic in my life, I've started contacting the manufacturers of the products I like and asking them to go back to glass/ceramic/paper, reduce packaging, go organic (yeah right!) and otherwise "go green". I'm all for small companies putting out great green products in green packaging, but the way to affect REAL change is to change the behavior of the people who are controlling the majority of the market share (Kraft, ConAgra, Cargill, Safeway, Albertsons... take your pick). Today we're going to use mayonnaise for our example.

I grew up eating mayo on just about every sandwich. I love sandwiches, and I've yet to find a replacement that tastes as good to me as Best Foods Mayonnaise. I know it's not particularly good for me, so I try to put as little on as I can get away with, but I love the stuff. For the sake of argument, we'll call it one of my guilty pleasures (because I'm bothered by the fact that I'm contributing to a multinational corporation with a rather spotty record.

Used to be that mayo always came in glass jars. They were useful for lots of things when you were done storing mayo in them... drinks and fluids of all sorts come to mind (my favorite was lightly used degreaser that I reused). So why the switch to plastic jars? Sure, they break less and weight less so they cost less to ship... but plastic almost NEVER gets recycled, and you can't take one mayonnaise jar and reuse it as another mayo jar or melt it down and make another one (a stupid idea anyway, but at least you can do it). Plastic mayo jars... well, it's hard to every get them really clean. I certainly wouldn't store other edible fluids in them (the washing process tends to scratch the inside of the jar and everyone knows (don't they?) about how plastics degrade when you scrub them... yuck.) The plastic (even after scrubbing) always seems to retain the smell of the mayo... the glass ones never did that.

So I called them to let them know what I think of their plastic packaging... the first thing they said was that they hadn't used glass in 2 years (and I don't think she meant it to sound as flippant as she sounded). I told her that I had only recently become aware of the "eastern garbage patch" and that I didn't want to contribute to that anymore with their mayo jars. She became a lot more polite after that, wrote down my comment and said that she would forward it to the marketing dept. We shall see. If you feel like I do, start calling the people who make the products you like and tell them what you want: the won't know any other way (focus groups are stupid and they know that when people actually volunteer their comments without any pay, that they're getting real data). They need to hear from a LOT of people in order to make changes. I implore you, dear reader, to ask for reduced packaging and packaging that allows for true re-use: if I haven't HAMMERED this point enough, read the article about plastic in the ocean, ok?

Holy Sh*t… The Story of Stuff

God dammit. I just watched The Story of Stuff and I started crying. I had to stifle my sobs actually, because my son is sleeping, and it would suck to have to put him back to sleep all the while trying to explain to a toddler that my generation and the several preceding it have done a horrendously bad job of taking care of our planet and our country. Do I weep for what is lost to everyone or just what *I* might never experience? Selfish or Selfless? Maybe a little of both. As a revelatory slap-in-the-face, The Story of Stuff made me feel pretty bad about the world my son has to inherit at the moment. I hope to be able say someday that I played some small part in making some changes for the better. Rationally, I know I didn't cause the problem by myself, but I know I've been a part of the problem more than once. This little 20 minute video is kind of like taking the red pill, if you'll excuse the pop-culture reference.

"What does that mean?" "It means fasten your seat belt Dorothy, 'cause Kansas is going bye-bye."

The Wachowski Brothers

Please please please, if you click on only ONE link from my site, let it be to the THE STORY OF STUFF. Wait, have I said that before? I think I might have. It gets hard to recall all your entries when you start approaching 200 blog entries.

I found another link that was moving to me as well this evening: The Road Witch project is very cool, and I think very effective. I believe some of their inspiration came from the folks at Creative Communities, and in particular, I was rather inspired by the 7 Principles upon which a Positive Social Virus is propagated. I hope to propagate some of the traffic calming techniques in my own neighborhood.