My wife and I have been looking at the amount of trash we generate each time we go to the grocery whether it be on land or aboard Malaya. There are a huge number of things we now purchase that once came in glass containers and are now plastic, would love to have the glass ones back. In all the years we have cruised we have never had a broken glass container, fact my wife uses glass baking dishes and has never yet broken one of those on board though one or two haven't done very well after hitting the tile floor in the kitchen at home.

So besides the shopping bag issue which many communities have found rather difficult to fight, lets work on getting food suppliers to return to glass jars for things like peanut butter, olive oil, mayo, and such like they use to be...that would eleminate a hugh chunk of plastic.

I don't know if anyone here has ever done this but we always remove as much packaging as we can and repackage as much as we can into vacuum bags before we stow away food on board, getting rid of packaging has prevented bugs as more than once we have opened a box to find the package inside already crawling with critters, the amazing part is once we are done we usually have a larger pile of packaging than we do food. Items we have vacuum bagged (we now use the new ziploc vac. bags) remain fresh, don't take on oders and fragile items like crackers don't get broken as they are now a solid block. What packages we have left are glass, metal, the plastics we can't eleminate and paper we can chuck or save for the burn pile.

Repackaging and just plain eleminating packaging has allowed us to stow upwards of 3 times or better the amount of food we would otherwise stow.