Saving the planet with peanuts

18. August 2008 by Joe Gergen.

Packing peanuts, that is.  If you ever order anything online, you know that everything is sent to you with packing peanuts. I ordered a book. It came protected by packing peanuts.  I appreciate the effort to ensure the safety of my book, but really. I ordered some supplements online.  Two little bottles came in a 10×10 box filled with peanuts.  Would you like some product with those peanuts or are the peanuts just fine? I was tempted to order some circus peanuts online but was afraid I might eat the wrong ones.

It’s an inundation of peanuts. Soon they’ll take up more room in landfills than disposable diapers, which may or may not be worse than incinerating them.

But unbeknownst to me there is an underworld of Styrofoam scrappers (metal scrappers are a whole other story) out there who want your peanuts. My friend Linda gets kudos for pointing this one out to me.  She was cleaning out some old boxes and packages and had all these packing peanuts. So she went out to Craigslist and informed people that she had several bags of packing peanuts for free. Apparently she got all kinds of responses and someone who sells stuff on ebay came and picked them up.  What other subcultures are out there on Craigslist? Hmmm.

So all you people ordering things online and especially you ebay addicts (you know who you are), save those peanuts.  And when you have a couple bags full, let Craigslist know and we’ll save the planet one peanut at a time. 

Too bad there’s nothing to be done with those disposable diapers. Unless there’s some strange world of diaper scrappers out there that I don’t know about yet…or maybe I don’t want to know.

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