According to Re-nourish, a nonprofit that provides online tools for sustainable living, "In the United States, containers and packaging constituted the largest portion of the municipal solid waste generated in 2009: about thirty percent, or about 72 million tons (see fig. 3)." This is a ridiculous amount of waste that we're generating. In order to shrink this number, we can recycle and reuse our packaging. My family uses plastic grocery bags to pick up dog waste, old lunchmeat containers as tupperware, yogurt containers as bird food bowls, cardboard egg cartons as planters for seedlings, and toilet paper and paper towel rolls as bird toys. We try to recycle all our other packaging. If you've got other ideas on how to reduce/reuse packaging waste, please post below.

Here's the link to the Re-nourish article:
http://re-nourish.com/?l=articles_detail&id=120

Americans recovered 34% of waste generated in 2009. That means we threw away 161 million tons of material, which totals to about three pounds of garbage per person per day. The simplist way to reduce this is recycling. My family reuses glass mason jars or mustard jars for salad dressings. We also like to use reusable grocery bags instad of plastic bags.
http://www.kab.org/site/PageServer?page … _and_Stats