There are some things we haven’t figured out how to buy without packaging. And truth be told the pandemic has seemed to make it even more difficult. However, we still try to reduce our impact where possible. Here in one example: parmesan cheese. I actually did buy a block of solid cheese without packaging and grated it myself last year. I did this about twice and the end of the block is still sitting in the fridge. Grating your own hard cheese is hard work and took away the benefit of “quick dinner spaghetti night”. So I went for my plan B which is to buy the biggest one I can find and try to avoid as much plastic as possible.

I found this at my local cash and carry. It is big family size and mostly cardboard. This tower of cheese lasted my family for around 6 months. When it was all gone I thought I would try to soak it to see if I could separate the recyclable bits. We do this with concentrated juice (another packaged product that comes into the house regularly). I buy trays of concentrated orange juice that has cardboard sides and metal ends. Once you have made the juice you can soak the packaging in a bit of water and in about 10 minutes the plastic liner peels off and you can separate the cardboard sides (recyclable) with the metal tops (recyclable). So I tried it with the parm. container and it worked great! Here is what was left.

Once soaked in water it all peeled apart and we were left with a little ball of garbage (foil wrap from inside the tube and plastic wrap from the outside) and, cardboard, plastic and mental lids which all went in the recycling. It’s not a perfect solution and I’m not fooling myself to think that those little plastic lids will get recycled because chances are they won’t. However, I can’t help but think that if all families did this even as much as we do the recycling bins in our city would way emptier and maybe the little plastic that went in them would have a better chance at being reused. Either way I was able to sort all this package and increase the chances of it not sitting in a landfill for the next 700 years or so. Want to be inspired? Check out this town in Japan which has created a 0% waste culture. Here’s a closer example from San Francisco.