From Sustainability Studies students in Just Food: Sustainable Food Systems
Here in Northwest Indiana, we are positioned in between both the Mississippi and the Great Lakes Watersheds. Since our landfills will eventually leak into this water we should take a proactive role and begin rethinking what we consider trash. Eventually (ideally) everyone would/should be able to purchase items from the grocery store that would have zero impact on our earth, but in the mean time I’ve come up with 5 suggestions to help things we have acquired while buying our food products from ending up in the landfill.
“all landfills eventually will leak, out the bottom or over the top.”
5 Things from the Grocery Store that you can Repurpose and Avoid Landfill Contribution
| Plastic Bags & Coffee Container &/or Tissue Boxes Re-use emptied containers and fill with plastic bags. Keep in car and/or under bathroom sink so you always have a bag handy to place trash in.
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| Milk Containers Poke holes in the lid of empty milk containers and use to water house plants.  |
| 2-Liter Soda Containers Put a 1 inch layer of rocks for drainage, fill with dirt and use as planters
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| Paper Bags Instead of buying wrapping paper use old paper bags and add something personal |
| Half-Gallon Containers Make homemade place house for young ones. *Note: Be sure to sand down sharp edges  |
Not many of us can immediately and/or completely eliminate our personal contributions to the “systematic accumulation of substances produced by society,” but to get the ball rolling, we all can do little things that will develop into habits and eventually into a value system that I suspect will spread to our friends, family, and neighbors. For now realistically we all have plastics and other items that we routinely throw away that could be reused instead of in the landfills harming our local aquifers. If you can’t recycle – reuse.
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