We’ve all got to start somewhere, and I started with Kroger brand “Crumb dilly icious” sandwich cookies. No particular reason except for their ridiculous name, and the fact that I ate A LOT of them. Kroger, by the way, has an impressively (what I assume to be) tongue-in-cheek marketing strategy. Either that or they’ve really taken Brené Brown up on the power of vulnerability. Witness, for example, the back of a box of corn flakes:
Which reminds me that I actually started with cereal (back in 2020). Cereal inevitability comes in a plastic bag (at least that I know of) and oatmeal is so much better. It’s hot! You can put raisins, bananas, honey, walnuts, and chocolate in it. Cereal is just a habit.
So I stopped buying sandwich cookies, and I can’t say I’ve missed them. Instead, I’ve been making my own cookies, which so far hasn’t been particularly onerous (it’s interesting how far we have been conditioned into thinking that we are so busy, productive, important, that we couldn’t possibly find the time to make something as banal as cookies). One big batch a week seems to do the trick.
I also “returned” a bunch of Christmas packing materials to a local shipping store. That was pretty easy. Slightly more complicated was removing myself from mailing lists, which you can do at http://www.dmachoice.org (for $2) and at http://www.optoutprescreen.com. Now I just get mail from the city government and my various elected officials…which is acceptable.
The last thing I’ve done is buying a couple things in bulk. Namely, raisins (for the oatmeal), peanut butter, and various beans. All told, I’m probably saving myself five or six pieces of plastic a week. So there!
(a useful website I’ve found recently is: https://www.ecocycle.org/ You can even play a fun new recycling sorting game—at the end of each level you unlock items you can use to build up your park!).
recycled paper clips 