Paying for Garbage

How does it make sense to wrap all the stuff we want to buy in so much GARBAGE?

Take food, for a particularly egregious example. It is really starting to make me ill, when I look at something I’m considering buying and eating, that it is sitting there entirely encased in GARBAGE.

And you’re paying for that, too! Your good money, your hard-earned money, is going straight to the dump—you pay more for that box of cereal surrounding a plastic bag surrounding your cereal, and when you’ve taken the cereal out, you are going to send all that “packaging”—all that garbage—straight to the dump, AND pay somebody to do that!!! (Directly or through taxes, it IS going to cost you!)

How does that make any sense?

If you live somewhere where you can bring your own containers to a store and buy “in bulk,” you will save SO much money, you don’t even have to think about the garbage you are preventing. And “in bulk” doesn’t have to mean buying battalion-sized amounts of something that then goes to waste. You can buy just as much as you need or want, save money, save food waste, and not pay for all that garbage!

Of course, we have nothing like that here.

So it’s pick and choose and make some of our own stuff (so much fresher, so much better for you, so much cheaper!) from scratch, and where food is concerned, for the most part that’s “all good.”

But what about the other stuff the companies insist on encasing in garbage?

We have two cats in the house, and recently rescued a mama cat (pretty much a kitten herself) and four kittens that got dumped on the side of the road near our house (a sort of Living Garbage, I guess you could say--this happens FREQUENTLY here; but that’s a whole ‘nother blog!!!). Our old boy cat was getting stressed about this (despite the fact that the interlopers were all confined to the guest room), so I bought a Feliway “Comfort Zone” to help everybody chill out.

This thing was so inextricably encased in its “packaging,” you’d think it was radioactive! I had to take progressively more deadly weapons to the “packaging” (read: garbage!) to get the thing out of there. The outer, impenetrable casing was unrecyclable plastic (THANKS, Feliwhatever!!!), with an inner layer of printed paper (at least that’s recyclable). Of course the “unit” itself is all plastic (nonrecyclable). You can buy a refill rather than having to buy the entire thing again, but even the refill is nonrecyclable plastic (still), and again entirely encased in that deadly nonrecyclable, permanently-polluting and extremely annoying-to-remove plastic!

Why, oh why? Whatever happened to selling something in a box? Or, for that matter, just the product, on the shelf? Why does everything have to be covered and encased and shrink-wrapped and mummified in plastic?

This is all the more mystifying to me when I consider that plastic is perhaps the most PERMANENT material the world has ever known. And it is being used, UBIQUITOUSLY, for things that are meant to be used once—or for that matter, NEVER used, just employed as a barrier to something ELSE you want to use—and THROWN AWAY. (I should say, thrown “away”—as we’ve seen, there is no “away.”)

This is ridiculous and absolutely has to stop.

Please see my petition for a law to put a stop to it:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/to-the-end-of-the-earth/

Please click the link to read the entire petition to fully understand both the reasoning and what is being proposed.

While you’re at it, please sign it, too.

Thanks for supporting sanity!