Cost is Not Price Alone

The true cost of things is not reflected in the price alone. Since cutting the groceries down to less than $75 a week I have become acutely aware of our dangerous consumer habits. It is just thoughtlessness in everyday spending and I have been guilty of it myself for the majority of my life. Have a think about how much packaging you are buying in your regular grocery shop. If you made a concerted effort to cut this down or even eliminate it you would be making a huge contribution to a sustainable future. Consciously buy things that have reusable or recyclable packaging. Refuse to buy things that don’t. Avoiding packaging has the added advantage of forcing you to buy healthier less processed food – like a banana wrapped in its own skin… but sometimes bananas are packed in plastic..what’s that all about????
I do heaps of presentations demonstrating how cheap and easy it is to make all your own cleaning and cosmetic products and often mention how great Bin Inn is for avoiding packaging… I use old bread bags and fill them up with everything – sugar, flour and even coffee. (One day we will get a bread maker and say good bye to bread bags.) There is often a doubting Thomas in the audience who takes great pleasure in announcing that it’s actually not always cheaper buying from Bin Inn and sometime the packaged stuff at the supermarket is cheaper. My answer to that is that cost is not reflected in price alone and if I fill up my own container again and again from Bin Inn I believe that I am not only buying cheaply, I am also avoiding that hidden incremental cost that the planet bears disposing of unnecessary packaging in a landfill somewhere. Plastic bags alone are dumped into NZ landfills at the astonishing rate of 40,000 an hour and take up to 1000 years to break down. Someone, someday is going to pay a high price for that.