Last week, I wrote an article about how I wanted to cut trash out of my life. My first goal was to avoid using things with wrappers - and boy did I miserably fail. When you attempt to cut wrappers out of your life, you realize the large amount of things that come wrapped up. There were things that I started eating without even realizing it, like a granola bar. I would be about half way through eating one when I noticed the shiny wrapper and realized I messed up. Secondly, having a cold did not help in my quest. Cold medicine, cough drops, crackers, all these things come in nice little plastic wrappers, but were very necessary at the time.
Secondly, a problem I ran into was defining what I wanted to avoid. I eat at a dining hall everyday and at some point every piece of food was probably wrapped up. Does this count? For the sake of my sanity and wallet, I decided to not count the dining hall food as "having a wrapper." However, I have been trying to avoid foods that were still in containers or wrappers in the dining hall - like bread that is still in the bag or nutella (I was very sad about giving up nutella). However, these foods were easy to avoid simply because I had so many options available within my dining hall.
One item I have not been able to place yet is tea. I drink tea, lots of tea, about one to three cups of tea a day. I love tea, it is the wonderful fuel for my soul. However, almost every tea bag comes with a nice paper wrapper. I have always recycled these wrappers and whenever possible I compost my old tea leaves. Does this count? I decided that if I was going to give up nutella because of the plastic jar, I should give up tea. Thus, I have moved to using my tea infuser and attempting to drink mostly loose-leaf teas, but it's been a struggle.
Overall, I'm planning on continuing my efforts against trash, and hope that I eventually find a way to go completely without wrappers. One method I have found very effective throughout my week was swiping out a to-go box from my cafeteria. To-go boxes are reusable boxes students can use if they want to grab a meal without having to eat in the dining hall. I swiped one out on Sunday, filled it with things like carrots and grapes, and then have been eating it throughout the week. For me, this was useful in that I had snacks with me all the time without eating packaged food! I'm not going to assign a new goal for myself this week, but instead, hope to improve my current goal over the next week.
