What basket do you put your eggs into?

It hurts to see people buying eggs in Styrofoam cartons. Styrofoam has been “reasonably” linked to cancer. I personally do not need to see many studies to strongly dislike Styrofoam. Really, can foamed plastic – polystyrene beads in air – be good for your body, or the Earth? Helpfully, Washington D.C. banned it in 2014 for cooked food containers.

There are many products which are currently sold in Styrofoam, but I’ll talk about the eggs today. In a grocery store here on the East Coast you can buy eggs in three types of cartons – Styrofoam, plastic or paper. Styrofoam in not recyclable in most locations, and it may cause cancer. So, I hope you avoid it.  Plastic is recyclable in most locations, but our recycling rates, especially here in the Washington D.C. area., are pretty low – just over 20%.  Chances are that plastic carton will just stay in a landfill forever. The last and the best option is paper carton. Even if you do not place it into a recycling bin now, eventually, it will still have a chance to biodegrade, at some point, somewhere.  I have to admit that the prices you’d pay for eggs in different cartons vary – the most sustainable the packaging, the more you will pay for, mostly because of the eggs themselves.

Of course, the best option would be to reuse the same carton if you can buy eggs from a place that sells them loose. Do you have any colleagues or friends living on a farm? It can happen. By sheer luck I have such a colleague and buy eggs from her in the same carton every week.