A friend and I have been reading through 7: An Experimental Mutiny Against Excess by Jen Hatmaker. It’s about pulling out of the system; disengaging from this consumeristic, stressed-out, distracted culture. It’s an excellent read and it will make you want to pull your hair out.

Anyway, we got to the chapter on waste and got almost immediately overwhelmed. Apart from living in a shack down by the river and making our own shirts from our own hair (which might not fall under the “professional” label in my work policy manual), waste is going to be inevitable. So then, the question becomes how to we reduce our waste. God gave mankind this Earth to care for and we’ve done a really crappy job. How do we start reclaiming it?

Isn’t it Gandhi who said, “All good ideas start at Sonic”?

Maybe you’ve noticed that Sonic gives you an entire tree’s-worth of paper when you order something from them. Seriously, there’s the cup, the sticker that holds 7 receipts and a mint, the paper-wrapped straw, and about 19 napkins that you never use.

So, what do we do with that? We could just not buy things from Sonic, which would probably be the best option. But, who’s gonna do that? If we want to change things, then we need to come up with methods that people will use.

So…I read No Impact Man by Colin Beavan about a guy and his family that try to go carbon-free. One of the things that he and his wife did was carry around mason jars so when they got their morning coffee, they filled up their jars instead of disposable cups. It was quirky enough that the employees at the coffee shop humored them.

Kara, my friend, and I decided to try this out. If we decide that we will require a refreshing cherry limeade from Sonic, could we take a Mason jar?  We took some old salsa jars (that we had to wash again because Kara pointed out that they still smelled like salsa), drove up to Sonic, parked and sat outside on their patio, and then caught the attention of a young carhop who didn’t even bat an eye at the request.

No problems at all. They did bring us out one small receipt with a sticker, but other than that, no trash and we might be able to ask them to not print one.

Life tastes better in a mason jar.

Our next target? Starbucks!