We are certainly a family of waste and excess anyway you look at it. Toddlers don’t eat food: it gets trashed. Need a snack to take on the road: stash it in a plastic bag which gets trashed. Quart yogurt containers pile up by the twos each week: can’t recycle these, and saving so many isn’t practical, where do they go…the trash. And when you look at our 4′ high trash bin stuffed to the hilt with 5+ bags we set out by the curb twice a week, well, you wonder where all that STUFF must come from. We are only a family of two adults and two very small children.

I feel we live in a land of consumption. I experience excess all around us each day. Larger juice box portions that will only be thrown in the trash along with that plastic straw wrapper and the plastic straw. The omelette I was served yesterday at a restaurant was the size of an entire Bûche de Noël cake. I think I left almost half of it on the plate. Grocery stores are always stocked 10 deep 5 shelves high with tens of thousands of items that were harvested from the earth when? And traveled to my little national chain grocery football field  sized store from which tropical corner of the globe? So much at our fingertips has desensitized my family. We worry how we will survive if my husband loses his job on the three months worth of food in our chest freezer? Let us remember, gently, that there are individuals on this planet who have nothing to eat TODAY, not even clean water.

With a new year fast approaching, I am usually thinking about what I am hoping to set out to accomplish in the coming 12 months. So, I don’t have a “goal” in mind yet, although I do know it will have something to do with being a conscientious consumer.

My husband brought up a great point about the reason we set so many bags out for the trash truck. We aren’t thinking about the packaging we consume. Recycling and buying packaging to reuse it could shrink our garbage output considerably. I couldn’t bear to throw the large quart glass jar that held our raw honey into the recycling pile. I am now using it to hold our sunflower seeds I eat on a daily basis. I remember when I was a child my father had metal band-aid containers with hinged tops galore that stored his hardware from the 6d finished nails to his 2 1/2 drywall screws. My FIL still has stashed in his garage metal coffee cans filled with nuts, bolts, nails, and screws, fitted with that plastic lid.

But what about today? Coffee comes in not burlap sacks, or fabric sacks, or metal canisters, but in plastic foil coated bags with that weird extra plastic piece that is for “breathing”? Perhaps gone are the days of “real” useful packaging? And gone are the days that packaging wasn’t an issue? Are carrots really better in a plastic bag? We brought a Tupperware tub to get honey from the natural food store when I was a child. And then the 25 gal. store tub was returned to the farmer for a refill. No packaging there. Today it’s about being cheap.

Well, the way I see it we can:

• seek to buy products that have less packaging,
• or provide our own reusable bags for produce and shopping needs,
• or choose to make our own cookies at home (for those in my family who aren’t gluten intolerant…humph) and forgo that extra plastic box,
• or reuse the packaging that we do choose to consume in someway.

I was just wondering where I was going to get a bird-feeder to hold the birdseed I just purchased. Why not make one out of one of the non-recyclable plastic milk jugs we throw away three times a week?  (We are definitely not a lactose intolerant family consuming a little less than 3 gallons per week between cooking and bottles. Sometimes I think we should just purchase a cow.) Hummm, kid-craft idea. Oh, and composting is another item on my to investigate list that would greatly reduce our garbage pile.

If you are looking for ways to organize and or reuse some of the materials around your home, check out this Real Simple magazine link. There are 50 different ways to reuse old things. Check it out. A note about a little journey upon which I am embarking the first of the year tomorrow…stay tuned.