Recycling Cardboard Packaging

Here is a quick recycling idea. Maybe you already recycle paper, newspapers, or magazines, but do you realize how often store-bought food and household goods are packaged in cardboard? We love cereal, for example. My husband studied dietetics and has a whole sermon on how cereal is the perfect food; needless to say, we eat a lot of it. And all 5 of us play sports or exercise regularly, and we love Italian food, so we eat a lot of pasta, often packaged in cardboard. And with the household goods, there are boxes of disposable mop pads, boxes of toothpaste, dish washer detergent….The list goes on and on! Maybe you have a recycling service that already picks up newspapers. Many services will also pick up cardboard boxes that have been broken down. Ours only comes every 2 weeks, so if I want to get rid of it sooner, I take it to our local elementary school, which has a dumpster for recycling paper products. I open up a paper grocery bag in our pantry, next to the garbage can and another container for recycling plastics and aluminum. As I cook and use up products packaged in the cardboard, I break them down flat and put them in the paper bag until it’s full. Then it’s out to the curb for pickup and recycling, instead of taking up space unnecessarily in a landfill. I hope that manufacturers will continue to develop more earth-friendly ways of packaging their goods, but in the meantime, we can be careful stewards of our resources and get in the habit of reducing, reusing, and recycling.