BlogHers Act Canada: Reduce packaging this September.

It’s officially September. Holy cow, where the heck did August go?

September is the first month of a year-long sustained effort known as BlogHers Act Canada. We Canadians have spoken, and we’ve decided that environmental issues are important enough that we will raise our collective voices through the Power of the Blog to build awareness. This September, you’ll find blog posts written by your favourite Canadian bloghers about September’s focus, “Back to School/Work/Daycare with Less Packaging.”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I wanted to contribute to this topic. For me, autumn is no longer about going back to school or back to work, since I work here at home. It’s about the harvest. About hauling in the fruits of my gardening labour and making them last the whole winter long. The last couple of weeks have been a frenzy of canning and preserving the vegetables I’ve been growing this summer in my garden. I went so far as to buy a half bushel of cucumbers at a local farmer’s market yesterday, along with a big bunch of dill. Now it seems as though I have run out of jars. This is not good! I still have about a quarter of a bushel left and no jars to preserve them in. While I have caved and bought a couple of new boxes of jars (avoiding those packaged in plastic, of course), I’m starting to feel a little bit guilty about buying so many of them brand-new, when most of the year you can easily find mason jars all over the place, if you just know where to look.

Garage sales are probably the best and cheapest place to find used jars for canning. I’m not much of an early riser, but from what my friend Kelly tells me, you’d better be out and about checking the local sales by 7 am. In season, our local paper contains a section devoted to listing garage sales, complete with the items featured at each location.

Local thrift shops are terrific sources, too. In fact, just this morning I checked my local St. Vincent de Paul thrift store for mason jars. There weren’t any in at the time, but one of the employees took my name and number, and later found a whole box. While I was writing this post, in fact, she called to say she’d sell them to me at 25 cents each. Perfect! Goodwill and Salvation Army thrift shops as well as Value Village are great, too.

Call me a garbage picker, but lots of people just throw old jars into their recycling bins. Once it’s on the curb, it’s all yours, if you’re willing to hunt. I’ve seen boxes marked “FREE” filled with old jars at the side of the road before, too. I’m not sure why I didn’t pick them up.

I’ve also posted a message on my local Freecycle message board. According to its website, “The Freecycle Network™ is made up of 4,107 groups with 3,806,000 members across the globe. It’s a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. Each local group is moderated by a local volunteer (them’s good people). Membership is free.” Try Googling “Freecycle” and your city’s name to find a local group.

These places I’ve listed are amazing sources for all kinds of things you might be looking for, without having to deal with all of the packaging so many goods are sold in. Remember to bring some cloth bags or a cardboard box with you so you can also avoid being saddled with someone else’s plastic bags.

Well, I’m off to pick up my cheap, cheap, no-packaging required new old mason jars.

Happy back to school, everyone! And stay tuned for October’s issue, “Recycle!”

Sending wedding invitations is as important as ordering wedding dresses or the wedding cakes. Everything should be prepared from the wedding rings to the flower girl dresses.