Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Because we've long had a commitment to environmental responsibility, we've made every effort to avoid the use of plastic in all aspects of our lives.  More important than recycling is just to never buy plastic stuff to begin with!! Paying attention to packaging is just one good way to avoid needless use of petroleum products.

By growing and preserving our own food we are able to avoid all the packaging that comes with buying commercially prepared foods.  Unfortunately, we still find we need to use plastic bags and boxes in our own food preservation.  But the good part is...we use these products over and over again!  

When freezing vegetables we use plastic bag liners inside of cardboard boxes.  We rinse and reuse these bags as many times as possible.  The food that they have contained was boiled before it went into the bag.  Then it was frozen.  There was no chance for it to go bad, so why not use the bag again?

In the lower photo you can see a row of cup hooks in the bottom of the shelf over the kitchen sink.  The cup hooks are a very handy way to dry the bags before packing them away to use again next year.

In the top photo you can see the freezer boxes we use.  We use sharpies to write the contents and date on the outside of the box.  Different colors for different years.

We have had a few boxes get wrecked over the years, but on the whole we are very neat packers and don't often spill any food on the boxes as we fill them.  Many of our boxes date back to 1987.