Going grocery shopping these days can be quite an experience!  There are so many different tastes and flavors right at your fingertips to choose from that often it can be difficult to decide which product is the best.  Most of the time, consumers base their decisions solely on the contents of the package, but have you ever stopped to think about the packaging itself?

Believe it or not, the packaging that companies choose to use for their products can have a huge impact on the quality and freshness of the food inside as well as on the environment.  Evergreen Packaging is on a mission to educate consumers as to why they should choose products packaged in paper cartons over those that use plastic bottles or cellophane wrappers.  Keep reading to learn more!

As you can see from the picture above, my family had several food products packaged with paper cartons.  Finding these in the refrigerator proved to be a little more challenging than in the pantry, but items like eggs, coffee creamer, milk and yogurt are relatively easy to find with paper packaging.  We even had several varieties of lunch meats and cheeses in paper cartons, but these are definitely less prevalent.

So why should you care about the choice between paper or plastic?  Packaging plays a very important role in keeping food and beverages fresh.  The environmental impact of a package is just as important as the contents inside.  Just look at these eye-opening facts about the benefits of buying food packaged with paper cartons:

• Cartons are made from renewable materials – more than 70 percent of the carton is made from paper, all using trees from responsibly managed forests.
• Over 41 million households have access to carton recycling, and that number is on the rise.
• The paper fiber contained in cartons is valuable. Recycled cartons are used to make products such as tissue, office paper, wall boards and other building materials.  To learn if your community accepts cartons for recycling, please visit www.recyclecartons.com or check with your local recycling program.
• Cartons are made with renewable energy. More than 50% of the energy used to make the paper in Evergreen Packaging’s cartons comes from biomass.
• Responsible forestry promotes new forest growth, and these forests help to diminish greenhouse gases. Forests remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in trees.
• In the US, due to both increases in the total area of forest land and increases in the carbon stored per acre, an additional 192 million metric tons of carbon are sequestered each year through responsible forest management programs nationwide. This offsets roughly 11% of the country’s industrial greenhouse gas emissions, the equivalent of removing almost 135 million passenger vehicles from the nation's highways.

Because my family is a big believer in recycling, we have decided to use our power as consumers to choose products packaged with paper cartons over the plastic-packaged alternative.  If we all band together and start choosing paper over plastic, it won't be long until product manufacturers get the message and change their products' packaging accordingly.  Help raise awareness about an easy way that everyone can be more eco-friendly and just choose cartons!

For more details, visit choosecartons.com. Join the conversation!  Follow @choosecartons on Twitter and via Facebook at facebook.com/choosecartons.

Disclosure:  I wrote this review while participating in a campaign by Mom Central Consulting on behalf of Evergreen and received a promotional item to thank me for taking the time to participate.