Several months ago I realized that I was using up an entire canister of Crystal Light drink mix every week. I am not living in an area where I can recycle that kind of plastic, and I was concerned about what to do with the empty canister. As I said, I was using an entire canister – that is 52 cans a year! I can think of a few things to do with them, but I was accumulating way too many!
I saved some for a while and then gave them away on Freecycle to someone that needed them for a craft project for little kids. OK, great. That got rid of a few dozen of them.
So I went to the website of the company that makes Crystal Light and found a link I could use to make suggestions. I wrote to the company, suggesting that they change the canisters from plastic to cardboard. Since plastic is made from oil (and we all know how expensive THAT is) it is reasonable to assume that switching to cardboard would generate in production savings AND be better for the environment.
Their response was, in essence, (and this is not a REAL quote) “we don’t want any suggestions on improving our product packaging.”
It wasn’t long after that exchange happened that my store stopped selling the ONE flavor of Crystal Light that I liked, so I switched to the store brand of a similar flavor, which cost less than half of the Crystal Light did anyway. So, I am spending less money (which is good) but even the generic version is in a plastic canister. I don’t know why they can’t switch to cardboard, like the Pringles chips cans are!