Peanut butter and sustainability

From Liz

When I started saving empty jars -- jelly jars, pasta sauce jars, peanut butter jars -- it was at first because I couldn't bear to throw them out, and there's no recycling program for my building. And they were perfectly good jars! But opening a kitchen cabinet and finding more empty jars than actual food unnerved my roommate, so I got rid of most of them.

Then I finally hit upon a reason to keep them: They were perfect little storage containers for almost everything I would have put in a plastic Tupperware or in another piece of plastic wrap (things I knew would never, never break down in a landfill). Today, I've got a column for you about my trip to a landfill and my love for peanut butter jars.

To me, sustainability -- global citizenship -- is made up of many parts, and making my "garbage footprint" a little smaller is just one part. Now that I've started to see myself as a member of a worldwide community, I'm less likely to just toss something into the trash. I'm more mindful about it. I'm far from perfect; for example, I've got a stack of papers on the floor of my home office that will be recycled at some point, but I have a feeling I throw out just as much.

Coming up, a guest blogger writes about what happens when a guest speaker at a business conference turns out to be someone who's seen the Earth from 52,000 feet up.

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