Hey all,
Lately I’ve been working on going vegan, which has meant that I’ve been using beans as an ingredient a lot more in my cooking. I use just about any beans for hummus, I’ve made roasted chickpeas with my air fryer and want to start making falafel, I want to start adding black beans to my tacos, I use mung beans for omelettes, you get the drift.
Anyway, I was recently thinking about the packaging the beans come in. This came to mind since I’ve been re-evaluating the products I purchase and how to put my dollar where my heart is, and in looking at where my canned beans come from, I started thinking about the packaging of the dried beans I have.
While not all the dried beans I have include info about the ability to recycle the packaging, Walmart for all their flaws made things easy with some dried beans I got in the past and has the “Not yet recyclable” label from how2recycle.info, and I can guess that the other brands I have are in the same boat as they all appear to have the same packaging.
In comparison, I already know for certain that the cans for canned beans can be recycled, and the labels are just paper, meaning the same case for them. Now reading things from what I know it appears as if using canned beans is more environmentally suitable than dried, assuming both are sourced domestically, but I want to ask if there’s anything I might be forgetting here that could also factor into things that I may not be aware of. On top of this, some recipes specifically call for dried beans, and I’d have trouble substituting them with canned product, namely with falafel and my vegan omelettes.
Should I make the switch? Any and all input is greatly appreciated.
So I’m no expert to start. If you’re looking at “environmentally friendly” as a whole, its complicated. How much/many emissions are produced recycling and making new cans? How much is made for the stupid plastic bag that could probably be a cardboard box? The actual amount of plastic is pretty small, but it will exit until the plastic eating bacteria start to take over the world.
Personally, I’m not entirely zero waste, so take this for what it is. I would just use the dried beans for now. The amount of waste that produced is negligible compared to all the dumb shit corporations produce (which I can understand also negates most of what we do as individuals). Unless you’re a purist, I would get rid of the big sources of waste first, leave small things last, but in the mean time push for local companies to switch what they do, convince the people where you work to use different packaging, or do the same for local government.
I’m also open to hearing others’ opinions.
I would probably call myself a purist. Then again, I think that’s fairly easy for me since off hand, the biggest source of waste I can think of in my case is likely food waste currently, and I’m trying to improve on that since I’m relatively new to regular home cooking, and am in the middle of a major diet change.
Worst case scenario if the recycling of the cans does have considerable emissions, I could also probably purchase carbon offsets, mind you I need to read more about those and how they work and that would be for when I’m in a better financial situation.
That’s fair, I honestly never looked into offsets personally beyond what they claim to use as big corps.