It's not frugal to buy disposable goods

[Guest guest]

It's not frugal to buy disposable goodsLet's buy them again, so we have something to throw away. We have to keep the landfills overflowing, don't we? And what about the economy? Gotta keep buying, buying, buying... Paper towels. Paper napkins. Disposable diapers. Disposable baby "bottles." Plastic forks and knives and spoons. Plasticized paper plates. Throw away cleaning cloths. Disposable cameras. Rusting DVDs. That's not to mention cardboard, paper and plastic containers of various sorts - bottles, jars, meat trays, boxes... you name it, we throw it out. And we call ourselves frugal? Buying just paper napkins and paper towels may not seem like a very big expenditure, but get out your calculator, and add up what you could save by not using them at all. Lets assume that the family of four uses four napkins a meal, for two meals a day. Eight times 7 days in the week is 56, or over two hundred a month. At an average of two dollars a hundred, that's $48 dollars a year just for something to wipe your mouth on! That will buy a lot of cloth napkins that will last several years. To be more frugal, make your own napkins from worn sheets, shirts, or whatever is on hand. Then you save the entire 48 dollars right away. Paper towels...you do the math this time. I would venture to say you could spend up to a hundred dollars a year on them. For paper towels, keep rags on hand. They can be laundered and used over and over, and when you get into really messy things, they can be thrown out - just like a paper towel. Plastic knives, forks and spoons are frugal to use only when there's a chance that your regular flatware will be lost or damaged, or when you don't have enough for a large gathering. They can be washed, too, and reused. Disposable cameras? Although they are very inexpensive, it still costs the same to have the film developed that it does from a camera you can use thousands of times over. Disposable diapers don't make a lot of frugal sense, either. Even at the cost of two dollars each, cloth diapers last throughout the entire diapering stage. (Not to mention uses afterward - dusting and cleaning cloths, or passing them on to someone else.) With automatic washers and automatic dryers, it takes very little effort to wash and dry them. Put them in, turn a dial, punch a button... even if you line dry them, there is very little time and energy used. It would take a lot of hot water, detergent and time to pay for a weekly package of disposable diapers at the exorbitant prices they charge. And how much will it cost to our environment? The more labeling and packaging a food has, you can bet the more processed it is - and the less frugal. Over processed foods are usually over priced and not very nutritious, making for a very poor value. A simple rule of thumb: If the packaging is more than absolutely necessary, don't buy it. Prepackaged meals and snacks simply cost too much. I don't even want to think about disposable cleaning wipes, disposable mop pads or disposable dish cloths, for heaven's sake! Where will this madness take us? To disposable money? That's the way we act when we buy things with extremely limited life spans for extremely limited purposes. We just throw our money away. Dont we have better things to do with it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Diana Gonzalez

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