I love these ideas. Thanks for a great post and for contributing to the carnival!

Beth

When people buy gift certificates, try to buy email gift certificates otherwise they will send the plastic ones. My brother gave my son a plastic card similar to a master card gift certificate and if you don’t use it right away, it depletes monthly. On top it, you can’t recycle credit cards! And you know what they are made of?PLASTIC!!!

I actually got so infuriated with plastic credit cards that I wrote a post on how to reuse them. Beth, I hope you don’t mind that I link the post here. If so, just delete the link.

18 Ideas to Reuse Expired Credit Cards

And I do still reuse a plastic bag for bread. I buy bread either without any packaging (from the bakery, put into my cloth bag) or in a paper bag. Then, when I get home, I put the cloth or paper bag inside a reused plastic grocery bag. It’s the only way I’ve found to keep it from getting hard.

I think you’re idea is fine. Wrapping your produce in a tea towel and then putting that into a plastic bag that you reuse again and again serves the purpose of keeping you from needing new plastic bags and also keeps your food from coming into contact with the pastic. Seems okay to me.

Here is my first attempt…directed at that megamonster corporation of consumer stuff, Colgate-Palmolive.

Dear Colgate-Palmolive:

I believe we should all be concerned with the spread of plastic in the environment. The more that can be recycled the better. Even the oceans are now carrying a load of discarded plastic.

Since the entire container for your SpeedStick product is plastic, why not make it all of the same type so it can be recycled?

I visited your SpeedStick website and found this answer to my question in the FAQ section – “All of our antiperspirants and deodorants are packaged in polypropylene, polystyrene or PET packaging. Since they are made of mixed materials, they are not recyclable. Currently it is necessary to use these mixed plastics since the container is exposed to extreme temperatures during the manufacturing process.”

What I don’t understand is why the entire package cannot be made of the high-temp tolerant plastic. Then, the problem would be solved and, though the cost of the plastic might be higher, you could prominently display “fully recyclable” on the SpeedStick package as an advantage over your rivals that would justify a price of a few cents more.

Regards,

I’m behind in reading my blogs so tonight at dinner my mom asked if I had seen you posted a link to my blog. My husband and dad gave my mom and I funny looks while we talked about “Fake Plastic Fish” and “Crunchy Domestic Goddess” haha.

In all the years I’ve been making gift bags, I’ve never seen A SINGLE ONE reused. “Oh, they’re too pretty,” I’m told. “I couldn’t give it away!!” and so on. So, my good effort to try and cut down the Single Use gift packaging hasn’t helped. But I keep trying. :-D

I haven’t bought gift wrap for years. I use plain brown mailing paper… sometimes stamped with gold stars or other holiday-themed icons… but I go NUTS on the ribbons. I learned to make my own bows years ago. Oddly, the bows get re-used, even if the gift bags don’t! But a plain brown package with a big and happy bow topped with a gift tag made from last year’s Christmas cards (cut out with craft scissors… you get the holiday pictures of snow, deer, Santa, candles, what have you) and the packages come out pretty, inviting and a bit less wasteful.

I asked for a no plastic holiday last year and the family did OK. My grandmother had drawn my name and it must have killed her since we joke that she should own stock in 3M to recoup earnings on her hermetically scotch-tape sealed gifts. She got the clever idea of using dish towels instead of wrapping paper around the box, thus providing me with something useful as well as decorative. She used a little bit of making tape and a fiber ribbon to hold it together. The gift inside the box had come with plastic packaging (which she was appalled to discover when I opened it), but progress is progress!

Have a happy plastic-free holiday season!