I don't know about you, but I often think of paper cartons as "old school". I always think back to the milk cartons we used to drink in elementary school! I assumed, for some reason {social conditioning, maybe?} that plastic keeps our food products fresher. I've always leaned towards buying products that are eye-catching and modern – which usually happen to be in packaged in plastic.
But I've recently become aware of some staggering statistics, thanks to Evergreen, when it comes to choosing cartons vs plastic packaging and environmental issues.
- Reducing food and packaging waste with a great product- to-package ratio, an average of 94% product to only 6% package. So more of what you buy is product.
- 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.
- Cartons make transportation efficient because cartons take up less space in shipping to the processor and to grocery stores.
- Cartons are recyclable for tens of millions of households where facilities exist. To learn if your community accepts cartons for recycling, please visit http://www.recyclecartons.com or check with your local recycling program.
- 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 block UV light preserving the nutritional value of foods like milk.
- 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.
For even more info, visit: http://www.choosecartons.com
So, I went to my refrigerator to see just how many cartons I could find!
No judging refrigerator contents – I totally did this spur of the moment! I was not surprised to find a very few amount of cartons in my fridge. Like I said, I thought, for some reason, cartons were a worse choice over plastic – WHY?!
After learning so much about why choosing cartons is a good idea, I headed over to the Recycle Cartons website to see if carton recycling is available in my area – sadly, it is not. I'm not surprised, though. It seems that east Tennessee is slow at catching up with everything, especially green movements – but I have no doubt that we'll eventually get there, like the rest of the 41 million residents who have access to carton recycling!
Connect with Evergreen on Facebook and on Twitter – to help raise awareness of choosing cartons!
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.
3 Days Left 
