What do you do with leftover styrofoam packing peanuts? Learn our tips for recycling and reusing styrofoam packing peanuts in ways that are better for the Earth.
There aren’t a lot of shopping options where we live, so I do the majority of my shopping online. I end up with a lot of Styrofoam packing peanuts laying around the house.
The corn starch based packing peanuts are easy to deal with, but those styrofoam ones make me less than happy when I open a box and see them waiting there for me.
Since I hate throwing stuff into the garbage I know will never decompose, I have been saving them for a long time now. Unfortunately, because the garbage company where we live doesn’t recycle styrofoam packing peanuts or styrofoam blocks for that matter.
At this point in time, I now have more of these messy little nuggets in my home than I could ever use. So I started to look ideas on what I could do to use them without throwing them away.
That’s when I came across the Plastic Loose Fill Council website. The Plastic Loose Fill Council (PLFC) was founded in 1991 to develop, promote and implement the original use and subsequent recovery, reuse and recycling of polystyrene loose fill, commonly known as “packing peanuts.”
They have a search mechanism that allows you to find a location in your area to drop off your leftover plastic packing peanuts. Pretty cook, huh?
There are currently more than 1,500 collection sites in the US. Unfortunately there isn’t one in my town so I’ll have to wait until we go off the mountain to drop mine off somewhere.
Or instead, perhaps I could try having a conversation with our local UPS Store and see if they might be interested in becoming a drop-off point.