If you are buying more online, what are you doing with all the packaging and packing material?

I save some of the bubble-lined envelopes to use again, with tape-on labels and Magic Marker eradicated bar codes and stuff. I save a few of the boxes for later use and break down the rest for recycle. The super-fat air wrap things make me nuts, they are difficult to re-use.

Everything gets cut up or broken down and placed in my recycle barrel. The city can figure it out from there.

OMFG…

Funny you ask this.

The plastic stuff goes straight into recycling.

The boxes get broken down and my sister uses them in her garden. Something about blocking weeds.

She is a gardening machine. Really, she spends about 5 hours a day doing gardening.

Which is awesome. We have a big plastic five gallon bucket “the home depot ones” full of potatoes that were grown in our backyard… How cool is that? Made mashed potatoes from dirt in our backyard.

Now we just need to figure out how to turn the cats into butter and sour cream.

But we also have spinach and strawberries growing out there. Milkshake party up in this bitch..

I keep some of it in the garage for shipping around Christmas. I’ll use the cartons for that. As for the packing materials – Bubble wrap I keep, always useful for a ton of things. Paper based wrapping into recycling.

I never thought about using the cardboard in the garden. Interesting.
I’ve put them under the brush piles as starter when I torch them.

I have used the padded envelopes to protect my knees when I’m kneeling in the ceramic floor working on something. But I have so much of it.

I have used Styrofoam packing peanuts as loose-fill insulation.

Plastic wrap and film cannot be recycled by your town. Here is a Wrap and Film Recycle website to find a local recycle box.

Also we have a private pack n ship place that will take “peanuts”.

We have big trash containers for paper based waste, and plastic/metal based refuse.
I bought some big cardboard boxes to consolidate all the other smaller cardboard packaging, so I can get rid of it all at once.

I reuse and/or recycle the materials.

Large boxes are great for gathering yard waste. I drop the weeds and clippings into a box; when it’s full, I dump the organic matter at a nearby compost/mulch service, then flatten the box and place it in a recycling bin.

If there’s any plastic bubble wrap, I save it for when I need to pack something fragile.

Paper cushioning goes into recycling.

I recently discovered foam packing and bubble packs are great for cushioning my glass cooking pans to stack in the cupboard. I have bubble pack under my laptop to keep it from slipping around. I wrapped the chest freezer in bubble sheets to protect from the heat on my covered patio.
I give away the large bubble packing and cardboard boxes on a site called Nextdoor.

Here, plastic wrap of any kind is set aside from the regular recycling in a orange plastic bag. It (along with some clamshell food items and some other items) is suppose to be sent to Salt Lake City to be made into Diesel fuel. Plastic bottles that are marked with a “1” or a “2” are recycled along with cardboard, paper, aluminum and steel cans. Everything else is land filled.

@YARNLADY I really like the idea of using the bubble-pack envelopes between my pans. Maybe they will last forever now.