Two days ago, I wrote a post about how much I looooooved our Lenten discipline of reducing our household waste. There is a secret pile of plastic hanging out in my garage that I don’t know what to do about...
Maybe my kids are an anomaly, but they love their berries. Blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, and especially raspberries, which they like to stick on their fingertips (of course) and suck off slurpily. We do our best to eat seasonally, but, honestly, I have a hard time giving up berries. And cucumbers and green vegetables. We live in New Hampshire. At a certain point, we cut our losses and are thankful for refrigerated shipping containers.
But do you know what berries come in? Those annoying little plastic containers. I’ve tried to cut our waste by only buying the BIG little plastic containers, but basically, strawberries and blueberries are the only things that come packaged larger-than-pint-sized. This makes sense — any more than that in a raspberry container, and we’d have smashed and moldy berries. Nevertheless, this has been the plastic habit we can’t kick.
Even worse, it’s the plastic habit we can’t recycle.
Our town recycling facility accepts five kinds of plastic: pete no. 1 plastic beverage bottles; no. 2 milk jugs; no. 2 mixed household plastic; assorted large household plastics (toys, flowerpots, etc); and no. 5 plastic, which is collected in a “secret” bin beside the trash chute. Don’t try to sneak any no. 1 plastic that’s not a capped bottle: the ladies who keep our waste facilities running have to wade waist-deep through the piles of people’s less-than-clean recycling in order to weed out the recycling that doesn’t belong. And then it gets tossed.
Those little berry containers? They’re no. 1 plastic, but they’re not beverage bottles. So I’ve been collecting ours, hoping to find a way to recycle them. I have a 13 gallon trash bag filled with them. Every so often the bag tips over and spills what feels like a guilty secret onto the cool floor of the garage. It’s overflowing, at this point, and I don’t know what to do with it.
Is there a better way to do this?
Should I petition my town to accept more kinds of recycling at their facility? I am assuming that they don’t because of the cost, but maybe it’s just because people don’t ask for it. [Yesterday, the girl giving me a pedicure disclosed that she had just started recycling, in her mid-20s… It hadn’t occurred to me that maybe people just don’t recycle? Maybe it never occurred to anyone that they needed to recycle those berry containers?]
Should I sneak my berry containers slowly in to my sister-in-law’s recycling bin? — her town does no-sort recycling pick-up. [But what happens at their facility? Are there theoretically recyclable objects that they also have to throw in the trash because they’re not equipped to process them?]
Should I try to figure out a better way to package berries for mass distribution — compostable plastic? Wood baskets for short-distance transport? I can’t possibly be the first person who’s asked this.
Should I just cry, and stop buying berries, and listen to the wails of my children as we trudge past the beautiful displays of bite-sized fruit? My dear children, who have already given up drinkable yogurt, packaged granola bars, more than one box of snack crackers a week, and store-bought bread? My poor children, whose mother asks them, when they ask for milk that comes in plastic containers, “Do you want a duck to get its head stuck in this plastic ring? Are you trying to kill the turtles?” [Thank you, National Geographic Kids, for your well-photographed article on 6 ways our trash is bad for animals who live near or in water… ]
“No, Mommy. I don’t want to hurt the ducks. I can have some jar-milk from the farm instead.”
I don’t want to make them give up their raspberry fingers! What can I do???!