Zero Waste Challenge: Week 6 — Hello Fresh Has a Waste Problem
Week 6
We brought out a bag of garbage for the first time in two weeks! We probably could have stretched another week, but we found ourselves with an increased amount of plastic from food this week. The culprit? Hello Fresh.
Hello Fresh has a trash problem. Before I trash them, pun intended, I do want to compliment their recipes. We did a trial run for 3 weeks and enjoyed the food. I found that their recipes were simple enough to do without much effort. This is part of the problem though. In an effort to reduce complexity, or at least preparation time, they’ve precut or pre-portioned a lot of their ingredients. The cost for convenience is waste.
I imagine that most people do not bat an eye at this, but as we are focused on reducing our trash, it is things like this that we dislike. Because of that, we cut short our trial and cancelled before the final week. I contacted Hello Fresh when cancelling and reached out via Remark about this as well.
My hope is that even though I’m just one account, that Hello Fresh will at least take my concerns into consideration. I don’t know anything about the complexities of a food delivery service like this, so I defer to their insights and hope they can brainstorm ideas for sustainable packaging. We’ve all got to start somewhere to make a change! Here are our totals for the week, rounded up to the nearest 25%.
Trash: 25%
Organics: 50%
Recycling 1: 100%
Recycling 2: 50%
Extras: None
Recycling Tip of the Week:
Small plastics
Generally plastic pieces smaller than a credit card cannot be recycled, they’re simply too small and get lost in the sorting process. However, if you have small pieces (tabs from bread bags, milk tops, etc.) store them in a small container. If you drink milk or have another larger plastic container, before you recycle that, put the small pieces inside it and close it back up. The sorting machine will process the large item and all the plastic gets shredded together, which means your little pieces have a chance to get reprocessed!
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