I tend to like the bushman’s view and I like to apply it to “disposable” items where possible.

In the movie The Gods Must be Crazy a bushman’s super simple life collides with a coke bottle and is forever changed.  To him and his tribal mates the bottle has infinite value. In sharp contrast, that same bottle in our society is considered worthless. It is trash. I tend to like the bushman’s view and I like to apply it to “disposable” items where possible.

As I sit and write this I am looking at a plastic fruit carrier that I have been using for the last month to carry my fruit to work during my bus and walking commute. It is a cherished item that stops nectarine, peach, and apricot juice from making sticky the various pens, papers, business cards and other items that I have kicking around in my briefcase.  I am thinking about it, because it almost got recycled today. Not that recycling is bad, but I really felt that I needed to squeeze a few more trips out of this contraption.

Before you ask: What’s with this wacko? You should also know that we have a bag tree in our house where we air and dry our freshly washed plastic sandwich bags before we press them into service again. A bag tree you ask?  A bag tree is a section of a tree branch with sufficient side branches to support your assortment of plastic bags. Ours was given to us by a friend in Vermont and if we had kids it would certainly become a family heirloom at some point. Ours has the bark striped off as we are conscious throughout our whole household plastics reuse program to make sure the little beasties that could make us sick are given minimal opportunities to attack. But a bag tree could be anything that holds the bags, even some chopsticks and an old distributor cap.

What brand of plastic boxes and bags do we favor?  We really do not have a clue, because we have not purchased any directly for several years.  They are all “found” objects that we harvest from the stream of plastic we are forced to purchase during the course of eating.  We try and minimize this by taking our own containers to the COOP and farmers’ market but the amount is not absolutely zero yet.  And we have discussions at the breakfast counter over which plastic bags and boxes to save for reuse or recycle.

Did I mention that this behavior along with others such as composting and making some purchases based on packaging saves us money?  How? Most people on our street get their garbage collected once a week along with their recycling—big rolling containers chockfull of landfill eating mass.  We, on the other hand, get our recycling picked up weekly, but our garbage collected every other week.  So we pay a lower fee and I am monitoring to see if we might just switch to the even cheaper monthly pickup rate.  I know this level of excitement and anticipation is not for everyone, but give it a try and see how it works for you.  See if you can make the plastic gods crazy.