When I travel, part of the fascination is seeing the different ways we all live our lives, both good and bad.  As we travelled in America I became disturbed at the amount of trash we seemed to be leaving in our wake. I know that when travelling, and buying food on the run, you increase your consumption of disposable products and convenience foods, but I started to feel guilty about the large amount of garbage we were creating each day.  Then I realised that most times when we ate, even in restaurants, we were given items that ended up in the rubbish bins.  We needed to slash the trash!

At a motel Continental breakfast, the entire crockery and cutlery was disposable.  So just to eat cereal and juice we binned two plastic spoons, two plastic bowls, two plastic glasses, two paper coffee cups, one plastic stirrer (we shared) along with the usual waste of serviettes, sugar packets and yoghurt containers.  That’s a lot of trash!

At another cute café where we ate, we still received paper coffee cups, plastic stirrers, and sauce in individual disposable containers.  When we bought popcorn for the train trip it was already packaged in a paper bag but was placed in a plastic bag, inside a paper carrier bag. In our hotel rooms the drinking glasses have been plastic and individually wrapped in plastic.

It got me thinking about Continue reading →