The Jar Lady's Stats are Inflated
It's technically spring which means some magazine I read last week remembered there's this lady that the grocery store where she shops calls "the jar lady." Because instead of plastic bags she uses jars. Or something. I first read about her a year or two ago and for a minute she sounds fabulous, if a little nutty. Her family generates some insanely small output of trash and apparently I read about her in People because a .5 second search of Google leads us here.
In theory this sounds fabulous and is certainly worth an article in People as well as whatever magazine is featuring the matriarch of the family this month or last. (For the life of me I cannot remember which magazine used her as an expert on de-cluttering your life.)
Thing is, the "amazing, only _some insanely small amount of trash!_ " number trotted out is false. The family refuses packaging in store which means the burden of recycling their waste packaging is placed on the store's shoulders. In some cases this might not be a huge deal. There are some places that are set up for this, and by now it's entirely possible that whatever stores she and her family frequent have learned to adapt.
The problem arises when someone who was possibly inspired by this family pulls this in a store that is decidedly not up for the challenge. I had a couple who bought something with a huuuuuuge amount of packaging (we're talking a giant cardboard box, a ton of inserts, plastic and Styrofoam pieces as far as the eye could see) and de-boxed their precious at my register. Probably somewhere around 7:20AM or so. Our store is not equipped for people to do this, okay? So all that stuff those people didn't want to trek home got thrown out. Not recycled, not re-used, not anything good. No, this was thrown out along with the garbage because our cardboard compactor is frequently busted or full.
"But that's not their fault!"
Uh, yeah. Yeah it is. By refusing packaging on the grounds that you are trying to make things better for the enviroment, you should probably check to make sure the store that you've just trashed (seriously, where the blue hell was I supposed to shove all that crap for the next hour of my shift? My work area is CLEARLY the size of a postage stamp!) is set up to deal with the mess you just created, because guess what? YOU still generated that trash. That's still all on YOU. By declining the packaging without making sure there was any place for it to go, other than the trash, you just made a huge mess and expected someone else to clean up after you. Likely someone making minimum wage which makes the whole thing even more of a dick move.
It irks me so much that the closest to calling the No Trash Family out on it that anyone seems to have gotten was a letter People printed a couple of weeks later pointing out that refusing trash does not mean you didn't generate it in the first place. Somehow I doubt the people who read the original article all managed to catch that little gem.
Anyway, that's my rant for the day.
In theory this sounds fabulous and is certainly worth an article in People as well as whatever magazine is featuring the matriarch of the family this month or last. (For the life of me I cannot remember which magazine used her as an expert on de-cluttering your life.)
Thing is, the "amazing, only _some insanely small amount of trash!_ " number trotted out is false. The family refuses packaging in store which means the burden of recycling their waste packaging is placed on the store's shoulders. In some cases this might not be a huge deal. There are some places that are set up for this, and by now it's entirely possible that whatever stores she and her family frequent have learned to adapt.
The problem arises when someone who was possibly inspired by this family pulls this in a store that is decidedly not up for the challenge. I had a couple who bought something with a huuuuuuge amount of packaging (we're talking a giant cardboard box, a ton of inserts, plastic and Styrofoam pieces as far as the eye could see) and de-boxed their precious at my register. Probably somewhere around 7:20AM or so. Our store is not equipped for people to do this, okay? So all that stuff those people didn't want to trek home got thrown out. Not recycled, not re-used, not anything good. No, this was thrown out along with the garbage because our cardboard compactor is frequently busted or full.
"But that's not their fault!"
Uh, yeah. Yeah it is. By refusing packaging on the grounds that you are trying to make things better for the enviroment, you should probably check to make sure the store that you've just trashed (seriously, where the blue hell was I supposed to shove all that crap for the next hour of my shift? My work area is CLEARLY the size of a postage stamp!) is set up to deal with the mess you just created, because guess what? YOU still generated that trash. That's still all on YOU. By declining the packaging without making sure there was any place for it to go, other than the trash, you just made a huge mess and expected someone else to clean up after you. Likely someone making minimum wage which makes the whole thing even more of a dick move.
It irks me so much that the closest to calling the No Trash Family out on it that anyone seems to have gotten was a letter People printed a couple of weeks later pointing out that refusing trash does not mean you didn't generate it in the first place. Somehow I doubt the people who read the original article all managed to catch that little gem.
Anyway, that's my rant for the day.