"Clean Up Your Wrappers"

Nah, it’s not me, I just like the photo! I click on a free “save the rainforest” link every day, but forests in the U.S. are being felled as well, and for an easily avoidable reason: packaging for the country’s insatiable appetite for fast food. The Petition Site is hosting “Stop the 11 Fast Food Junkies,” in conjunction with the Asheville, NC based Dogwood Alliance. According to the latter, in 2007:

• the average American ate fast food 150 times, and generated 300 pounds of packaging waste
• Americans used 15 billion disposable hot beverage cups
• 32 percent of the U.S. domestic waste stream consisted of containers and packaging

Less packaging, more post-consumer recycled content, ensuring the paper for all these wrappers and other logo-driven packaging isn’t drawn from endangered forests — the Dogwood Alliance is pressuring fast-food purveyors to address all these issues. Their special focus is southern U.S. forests which are being heavily tapped for burger wrappers and other paper-based packaging, most of which goes straight into landfills.

Today’s mitzvah: Use the that freest of all weapons, your signature, to help put pressure on the big fast food chains to reduce and improve their paper-based packaging, to help preserve southern forests.

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