Today I learned that instead of recycling our empty plastic bottles and glass jars, we can clean them out and donate them to our local food bank. The food bank gets donations of bulk items — 20lb bags of flour, rice, large containers of laundry detergent, and so on — which they don’t distribute as-is. Instead, they repackage them in empty plastic bottles and glass jars so that they can distribute them to more people. So instead of dropping containers in the recycle bin, we can wash them out and bring them over to Sister Carmen.
I’m excited about this because
plastic recycling is kinda fraught with problems
to put it mildly. And even though the glass in the glass jars should
be more recyclable than plastics, it still takes energy to recycle
anything, so if we can reuse the containers as-is, we’re a little
better off. There’s a reason the slogan is
reduce, reuse, recycle
— those words are ordered in descending
order of importance.
It’s not much, but it feels just a little bit better than what we’ve been doing.