You must notice it too. There is a packaging crisis in our country. When I walk the pooch in the morning, I pass the garbage bins placed on the street for the garbage trucks and about every other one if full to overflowing, often with large pieces of cardboard or styrofoam peaking out of the top.

I go to the drugstore to buy something or other. I pay my money and walk out with the product. What I wanted was vitamins, what I get is: a plastic bag, a paper receipt, a cardboard box that contains the plastic bottle. The bottle has a plastic security seal, and a little cylinder inside that is a de-humidifier of somekind, or a ball of cotton. It's all trash except the pills.

Buy a banana and hamburger patty at the grocery? Bag for the banana in produce. Styrofoam and clear wrap around the meat. Cashier puts the meat in another plastic bag and puts the meatinabag in a paper bag along with my bagged banana. Add receipt. I have a banana (which when you think about it comes in a natural package), and a hamburger patty, and a ton of packaging.

Buy a digital camera the size of a wallet. The package could contain a football. A lap top computer? Comes in a container that would hold end table.

Where is all this stuff going? We bag it all up and put it on the street and call it garbage. But it isn't garbage. Garbage is icky, smelly stuff, or broken lightbulbs and dead batteries. This is packaging. I'll bet 85% of the stuff I throw away is packaging. My garbage company won't recycle unless I pay them extra to recycle. There should be a law about that. Since I live in "the bubble" it looks like we'd have a law that everyone must recycle all cardboard, paper, glass, plastic, aluminum, tin.

Ugh.