Question – Ziplocs and Foil
| August 26, 2010 | Posted by Issa under Kitchen |
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I’ve taken a lot of steps to reduce my usage of disposable products, such as switching to the Diva Cup, washcloths in the kitchen, and bathroom cloth. I like reducing my plastic use, too, and I have glass storage containers for the refrigerator instead of plastic Tupperware, and we freeze a lot of items like chili and salsa in glass jars.
There’s one thing that’s been bugging me, though, and that’s my usage of Ziploc bags and aluminum foil, which I use mainly for freezer storage. Some examples:
- Freezing the breakfast burritos I make in big batches. I wrap these in foil or cling wrap and then put a bunch in a gallon ziploc bag.
- Freezing loaves of bread. I love to have bread on hand, but it can be tough to buy or make it on the spot. Joshua will make a few loaves or I will buy some, and then we’ll freeze them. These go into aluminum foil.
Freezing is an excellent way for me to shop less often and make homemade items in bulk for future use. (The freezer is especially useful to me since I just filled it with a whole pig!) The glass jars store a lot of things really well, but there are also a lot of things that can’t fit into a glass jar. These still need to be stored in an airtight manner, though.
I do my best to save foil for future use and wash and save Ziplocs, but I’d still love to move towards eliminating them entirely.
Do any of you have ideas on how I could do this with non-disposable items or another way I could look at the situation?
Tags: Food, Kitchen
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This isn’t a whole answer, but might be a step in the right direction – people used freezer paper and sealed the openings with freezer tape to prevent freezer burn before Ziploc bags became the norm. The packets are bulkier with the paper, but a quick Google search suggests the freezer paper is compostable, and you could probably re-use it so long as it isn’t contaminated with meat. I’ve been considering switching to freezer paper myself, but haven’t made the switch yet. I’ll let you know how it goes if/when I do!
Prompted by your comment, I did some research. It looks like the difference between butcher paper and freezer paper is that freezer paper is plastic-coated for air-tightness and moisture-resistance (meat juices), while butcher paper is not. It looks like butcher paper would be compostable, but not ideal for medium to long term freezer storage, while freezer paper would be okay for long-term storage, but not compostable.
Still, this is a big help. I was aware of butcher paper, but had not distinguished it from freezer paper, and so had concluded that it was not a good option for freezer storage. It looks like freezer paper is a good step in the right direction. I mean, heck, you could even freeze loose stuff like green beans and such if you wrapped it up right.
@Leah That’s a great idea I never would have thought of, even though our pig meat is packaged like that, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to do it for other things. I wonder if freezer/butcher paper is something that can be picked up at the grocery store? I wonder if the tape could be compostable, too? Thanks so much for the idea; I’ll start looking into it. Let me know how it goes if you switch over.
In most cases both freezer and butcher wrap are poly coated which means they are NOT compostable. There are some areas in the US where butcher wrap is not coated, however you need to check the supplies available in your area.
As an update to this post, thanks for the suggestion, Leah – I might not have thought of this on my own, but freezer paper is the solution we went with. After our rooster processing adventure this weekend, all the meat is now nicely packaged up in the freezer in freezer paper! :-)