progress?

A lot has been happening this past week, so this blog is slightly out of time. The other day a friend of mine and I will often go out for Indian Take Away and eat it at my place and get caught up. We usually have a good bottle of wine to go with it. It's a fairly inexpensive way to get caught up and have a better than average meal.

It's usually pretty straight forward, make a call on the telephone, drive over for pick up and come back. This time I was surprised by the take out containers they gave me. In the past the containers have been the "Chinese Take out" white boxes, paper goods and fairly disposable. This time, they were plastic containers like margarine. I was thinking, nice upgrade but dang, how are these going to biodegrade? I know that most people are just going to throw these away and they will last forever. Most likely the paper ones would too, since landfills lack the oxygen and bacteria to make them disappear. But there was at least a chance. Also, the paper comes from renewable resources where as the plastic ones come from dino juice. So I washed them and I have them in my cupboard with the rest of the containers I've picked up over time.

It got me thinking that in our take away packaging we've started using more plastic? Why is that? Later this week I went to a potluck, and being overly busy people a lot of the attendees did take away, and there was a lot of plastic containers. I ended up taking some of the leftovers home including an industrial strength take away box. Now I still have this "doggie bag" plastic container from 3 years ago that I packed in my suitcase from a business trip since it had so much utility and I use it a lot still.

Is this really progress. Thankfully some things remain the same, I went out for a Subway sandwich the other night and they wrapped the sandwich in good old fashion paper, they even let me not take a plastic bag.

Is upscaling of things that are going to end up in the trash really a good thing? More value for the consumer, less for the planet. Hmmm.