To start the Evergreen Products blog tour, my instructions were simple: raid the refrigerator. Okay, not exactly. I was to take inventory of its contents.
Wisconsin Public Radio Magnet
My refrigerator likes Wisconsin Public Radio. Doesn’t everybody’s?
The Racing Sausages from Miller Park
Recipes and clippings stay up with the help of the racing sausages, of course. Doesn’t your refrigerator work this way?
Oh, I get it. I’m supposed to be looking in the refrigerator, not on it. Darn those prepositions. I need to look inside the refrigerator for packaging in general, specifically for paper cartons.
Open the refrigerator door, Hal.
Inside the refrigerator itself
I came to a conclusion quickly: I use too much plastic. Eggs are in a paper carton (recyclable or reusable), the cream for the homemade ice cream was in waxed paper cartons (biodegradable), but that was it. You see glass jars, including those from my own homemade jam and pickles and (the last batch of) salsa. Those are reusable. But overall, there’s room for improvement, and a lot of improvement.
To recycle cartons, first check to see if your community accepts cartons in their recycling collection. Mine doesn’t – yet – a disappointment, since my state considers itself a paper industry giant. I can still make a case for cartons, though. Paper, like that used in food cartons, is often made using renewable energy and recycled paper waste. Evergreen Packaging, the sponsors of this blog tour, use 50% biomass in making their packaging.
Evergreen also talks about responsible forestry. Wood for lumber, pulp, utility poles, and yes, food cartons, is a renewable resource. Taking care of the forests contributes to cleaning our air by removing carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas. I liked the statistics Evergreen provided:
In the US, due to both increases in the total area of forest land and increases in the carbon stored per acre, an additional 192 million metric tons of carbon are sequestered each year through responsible forest management programs nationwide. This offsets roughly 11% of the country’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions, the equivalent of removing almost 135 million passenger vehicles from the nation’s highways.
Wow. I couldn’t have said it better myself. To find out more, and to increase your own use of paper cartons and other recyclable packaging, look up Evergreen’s web page. I took their “carton checkout” activity and found out that I use eco-friendly packaging more often than I thought. Each time I clicked on a grocery item like milk or cream or goldfish crackers, I saw a fast fact about paper carton recycling.
Since paper recycling is limited in my area, I have placed paper cartons with or without waxy coating in my compost. I found some, like Chinese take-out containers, decompose beautifully. Juice cartons leave behind some of their colorful label; there must be a significant plastic content. Since my community isn’t ready to recycle these products quite yet, I’ll have to be satisfied following on Facebook and Twitter. You can, too:
https://www.facebook.com/ChooseCartons
https://twitter.com/#!/
I wrote this review while participating in a campaign by Mom Central Consulting on behalf of Evergreen and received a promotional item to thank me for taking the time to participate.