No more peanut butter jars

After saving our peanut butter jars for a few years, we've finally reached the point where we have to stop. We have a few hundred--more than enough to store our dried fruit for the fall harvest season. (We LOVE peanut butter. It's one of our favorite foods.)

I know we have enough jars--especially since we're nearing the end of the dried fruit we were storing in them, but it's hard to stop.

Sure, we can recycle them (and our county has one of the best recycling operations in the country), but recycling still involves the cost of carting the materials to the facility and the costs of reconstituting the material into new glass. (Of course, the costs are not ours, but for society.) And I doubt that this material can be infinitely recycled. Certainly many things are actually downcycled, not recycled.

These peanut butter jars have worked so well. They're of uniform size and store just the right amount of dried fruit. Each one would last for years, as has the quart-size jar that was sold for lemon juice a few decades ago. We're still using it today as a handy way to refill our water jug.

Why do we build in so much waste into our daily lives? It's clear there's a limit to the amount one person can do in this situation. I guess we could find a place that sells peanut butter in bulk so we wouldn't accumulate any more jars and we'd be able to use the ones we had, but that would entail a car trip basically just for this thing. And I have to admit that the Wegmans organic peanut butter is our absolute favorite peanut butter.  It's just organic peanuts and salt. (The late William F. Buckley was famous for his preference for Wegmans peanut butter.)  I'd hate to have to switch brands, and I don't think we can get this peanut butter in bulk.

I think the issue is bigger than just our peanut butter. Our modern society has come to think it's reasonable to have single-use containers for everything. It's convenient, but at what a cost.