Some of you may know that I do dog rescue, which is a whole other story about the throwaway animals in our country. But my question is about something much more literal, that I have noticed since doing dog rescue, and cooking for my dogs, and taking care of a number of them at home at a time: the amount of stuff we throw away. I am stunned at how much garbage I have coming out of my house now that I am doing this, and I would love to know how to entice companies to rethink this aspect of their packaging.
Follow me below for some examples:
I do a LOT of laundry now, cleaning blankets and towels for the dogs. The laundry detergent containers are big, and plastic. I could use powder, but I don't like how it cleans. OxyClean container, big and plastic, too.
Yogurt - I give my pups a lot of yogurt for the poor abused bellies, since most of the southern dogs come up with terrible worms. Cottage cheese, also. The containers are plastic, and big. In the garbage, about 7 a week. I try to reuse them for chicken broth I make for the pups, but they get weak after a few uses, so have to be thrown out. How else could yogurt be packaged?
I bought a flash drive to store dog photos. A huge clear plastic package for a little, bitty flash drive. Same thing for the headphones my daughter got.
Not dog related: orange juice containers. You can get the paper cartons, but some companies only put the bigger containers in the huge plastic containers. Wasteful.
Aluminum foil, sarah wrap - when they are finished, you have the box, the tube, all bulky, all wasteful.
I could think of another hundred examples, but my question is really, Do you have any ways to avoid or deal with all this waste? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.