Mcdonald’s egg-mcmuffin-minus-the-canadian-bacon is my early-morning airport guilty pleasure. I’ve been indulging in this long enough that I’m prepared for the buyer’s remorse when it comes to eating the sandwich (delicious melty “cheese” suddenly congeals into a rubbery cold substance on the wrapper and you wonder what sort of “food product” you just ate), but what really kills me is the packaging waste. I finish my sandwich, and now have a paper wrapper, three napkins, a receipt, and a paper bag, all of which, besides the wrapper, are perfectly pristine. There is no paper recycling in this terminal so I tuck it into a corner of my bag, to recycle it when I get home. City of Chicago: see what your bad recycling policies have brought me to? Hoarding trash. This is not the first instance of this behavior you have invoked.

PS – the in-flight service gives me the guilty heebie-jeebies, too. one can easily go through 3 or 4 of those clear plastic cups in a cross-country flight. styrofoam for coffee. a bleached white napkin under each cup. and all those snacks in single-serving packaging. ugh. okay, i still can’t resist the those fake-cheese-and-cracker sandwiches that southwest gives out, but i’m making a point of filling up my own water bottle at the departing airport’s drinking fountain and using that instead of having a new cup of water every time they offer me one. err, don’t say anything about the ecological damage that the jetfuel is doing, okay?