What Should You Do With All That Packing Foam?
If you send and receive a lot of things by mail, you are probably very familiar with packing foam peanuts. These are small bits that help you keep something stable in a package, and that also works as a shock absorber to keep things in place so that they do not break or roll around in a large box. These peanuts have been around for a long time, but they are not the same as they have been in the past. You may be surprised about what you can do with them, and sometimes what you can’t do with them, if you find that you have a lot of packing foam lying around.
You can always throw packing peanuts away, but most feel uneasy about this because they know they are just going to take up space in a landfill. Today, it really depends on the packing foam that you have in the package. There are the standard Styrofoam peanuts that have been used for a long time that will simply take up space in a landfill and may never decompose. If this is what you have, you may want to find a way to recycle them. If you have the newer type of packing foam, you may recycle them in a very beneficial way.
Recycling Packing Foam Peanuts
The Styrofoam packing foam peanuts that have been around for a long time are still used because they work very well and also because they are very inexpensive. If these are what you are getting in packages, you can see if you can find a place that recycles them, or you can do this on your own. You can save them in your home to reuse when you want to mail something out to someone else. It can be hard to save them when you don’t have a lot of space, but if you can, you can save money in the future by reusing them, and you also save them from landing in a landfill near you.
There are some packing foam peanuts that you can simply throw out in your lawn and forget. This sounds like a very bad idea, but in this case, it is a great idea. They are made from natural materials like corn and they are one hundred percent biodegradable and safe for the environment. The animals in your neighborhood can eat these as well – just make double sure this is what you have before you do this. You can also simply put the packing foam in the sink and they will dissolve in water or you can throw them out knowing they will act just as food in a landfill and disappear safely into the ground.
You can use other types of packing foam. Not all types come in a peanut form. There are sheets and other shapes that you can get for your packing needs. If you feel strongly about protecting the environment, as you should, you can make sure you are buying only the packing foam that you can reuse or dispose of without worrying that someone else can dig them up in a hundred years and they will look exactly the same. You can also use paper products instead of packing foam and recycle that, as well, as long as the object you are packing is not too fragile.