Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Plastic Free July Day 2

Just a quick post, (after all there will be 31 days of this).

A reminder: When you're looking for plastic free alternatives at the grocery store, you're going to have to have a sharp eye.  Plastic is a very sneaky item, and it can be hiding anywhere.

Say you normally buy soda in plastic bottles. But now you're doing your best to avoid plastic.  So you switch to aluminum cans.  Guess what your cans are lined with.  That's right, aluminum cans are plastic lined, and most still use BPA which messes with you endocrines.

Even if you buy things in glass, you will be getting plastic in the cap at the very least.  I used to make my own yogurt, but even glass milk bottles come with plastic tops.

Recently, I started buying locally made yogurt to save time, which comes in glass jars.  But now that my awareness is more finely tuned to spot plastic packaging, I realize that there is a small amount of plastic in the metal lids they use, and they have a clear plastic label on the jar.

I love what they're doing though, and I want to see their product for a long time to come, so I will contact them and ask them to consider changing their label.  I don't think there is anything they can do about the jar lid other than switch to BPA free jar lids.

Most foods use plastic in their packaging.  Even those little stickers on produce are made with plastic.

I promised to keep this short, so I won't go on.  But I will encourage you to start training your perception when you're shopping to notice plastic packaging.

We can all do better on this.


Ball/Kerr canning BPA free canning lids:  These lids can be identified by the presence of “Made in USA” on the packaging and lids themselves, and by dots around the border of our Collection Elite series lids. The lids also have a coating on the underside that is two or three shades darker than the previous lids – more of a taupe as compared with the previous cream.

From Growing A Greener World post last updated in June 2013.



The photo on the left is from Once Upon a Time in a Bed of Wildflowers

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