How Eco-Friendly Are Your Groceries? #choosecartons

June 26, 2012 By Hanan Webster 15 Comments *This article may include a provided product or affiliate link. See footer for full FTC disclosure.

Let’s play a game, shall we?

It’s called a Fridge Hunt. Go through you fridge and take note of what is made of paper packaging, paper cartons, plastic packaging, plastic cartoons, and what’s recyclable.

Here’s what ours looks like.

What did you notice most about your fridge?

Let me guess…a whole lot of plastics.

We often think so much about the food we put in our bodies, but never consider how that food is getting to us.

Did you know that choosing cartons over plastics can actually help in many ways?

Some interesting facts about paper cartons:

Over 41 million households have access to carton recycling, and that number is on the rise. In addition, cartons are made from renewable materials – more than 70 percent of the carton is made from paper, all from trees from responsibly managed forests.
Packaging plays a very important role in keeping food and beverages fresh. The environmental impact of a package is just as important as the contents inside.
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.
Cartons are made with renewable energy. More than 50 percent of the energy used to make the paper in Evergreen Packaging’s cartons comes from biomass.
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.

Honestly, these are simple things I never really thought of much before. Which is funny because I use reusable grocery bags and at one point even bought those reusable mesh bags for produce. What happened to those?

Heck, we even have one of those fancy 2-in-1 Recyclers which makes it super easy to recycle.

Here is my challenge for you.

Next time you go to the grocery store, try and purchase a product that comes in carton instead of plastic, or BETTER yet buy fresh and skip the packaging all together! When you get home, remember to RECYCLE your cartons.

To learn more about the benefits of carton packaging, check out the Evergreen website, where you can send out a tweet or FB post with information about the carton movement. For every carton fact shared, via Twitter, using the hashtag #choosecartons, you will help raise money for Habitat for Humanity. Don’t forget to follow Evergreen on Twitter and Facebook for updates about the movement as well.

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.