No, not the food itself, but the containers your food came in. Paper? Plastic? Something else? Did you know that paper cartons are recyclable? Not only that, but paperboard cartons contain over 70 percent which comes from a renewable resource, trees from responsibly managed forests. These cartons are manufactured using over 50% biomass, a renewable energy source made from wood byproducts.
Do you recycle? I’ll save the preaching if you don’t, but I’d love for you to learn why you should. Our landfills are filling up. Many things in our landfills are items that could be recycled into new products (like food cartons!), but instead will sit in a landfill and take decades or longer to break down. Meanwhile, forests are being cut down to supply paper for packaging, when we could be recycling old into new packaging.
Over 41 million households have access to recycling. Cartons are recyclable where facilities exist. The paper fiber contained in cartons is valuable. Recycled cartons are used to make products such as tissue, office paper, wall boards and other building materials. To learn if your community accepts cartons for recycling, please visit www.recyclecartons.com or check with your local recycling program. Unfortunately, cartons aren’t recyclable in our county, but I’ve signed up to receive notification when it does become available. We still recycle pretty much every other paper product that comes through our home.
Did you know that buying food in cartons helps keep it fresher as well? Take milk for example. First, the carton actually helps keep milk colder than a plastic jug does because of its insulation. Also, it keeps light out of the milk which helps preserve vitamins and nutrients that are light sensitive.
Using recycled paper products is also great for the environment. Responsible forestry promotes new forest growth, and these forests help to diminish greenhouse gases. Forests remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in trees. In the US, due to both increases in the total area of forest land and increases in the carbon stored per acre, an additional 192 million metric tons of carbon are sequestered each year through responsible forest management programs nationwide. This offsets roughly 11% of the country’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions, the equivalent of removing almost 135 million passenger vehicles from the nation’s highways. More trees help keep the air we breath cleaner.
To learn more about the benefits of carton packaging, please check out the Evergreen website. You can also like Evergreen on Facebook and follow them on Twitter. If you head to the Choose Cartons website, you can also send tweets with information about the carton movement. For each tweet sent, money will be donated to Habitat for Humanity.
Buying food in cartons will help you make a difference – a difference in our air quality, your food freshness, and in our landfills.
I wrote this review while participating in a campaign by Mom Central Consulting on behalf of Evergreen and received a promotional item to thank me for taking the time to participate.