Plastic Easter
One of my jobs involves seeing which products are on the shelves at grocery and drug stores. Every week I check the seasonal aisles and when I started back in October it was the Halloween candy that was stocked on those aisles. I was pretty amazed at the amount of plastic that was going to be handed out since half the candy seemed to be in some sort of plastic container. Some examples would be a couple of pieces of candy in a hand-sized plastic pumpkin or some M&Ms in a plastic tube with a plastic character on top. This kind of packaging held constant over Christmas and Valentine's day, but Easter has taken it to new heights. I assume this is because hiding plastic eggs in the backyard now takes preference over the old-fashioned hard-boiled kind. But this goes beyond the old empty plastic eggs that you filled up with candy out of a bag and then reused those same plastic eggs from year to year. No, these egg shaped plastic containers already have candy in them and don't appear to be reusable. Buy a bucket of them, throw them out in the yard and you are done. Perhaps it's convenient, but all that plastic seems so wasteful and unnecessary. Is a plastic egg really more fun to find than a hard boiled one?