I found the wrapper of a cheese stick on the floor of my car last week, and I felt a little guilty. I think I do a pretty good job of avoiding single-serve, individually wrapped products, and the mountains of waste they result in, but there it was, staring at me.

“Why do I buy cheese sticks?” I asked myself, and I knew all the answers. Because it’s an easy snack, all protein, that I can toss into the lunch bags. Because I know where to get a 24-pack for pretty cheap. Because the kids will eat them, even though they won’t eat a piece of cheese cut off the block in their lunches. At home, yes. In the lunch box, no.

But still. Twenty-four individual sticks of mozzarella, each wrapped in plastic, and then sealed into another plastic bag. It doesn’t make much sense. Even if I put them into my reusable shopping bag.

Avoiding plastic makes me feel like Sisyphus. As soon as I eliminate one form, something else shows up.

I stopped at a fast-food restaurant that I never go to last week, because they were giving away cups of free, organic coffee. But you can’t hand a reusable mug over the counter, especially during flu season, so my free coffee meant a foam cup with a plastic lid, something else I generally try to avoid.

And going grocery shopping is like walking around with the Little Green Angel on one shoulder and the Practical Nag on the other. “Yogurt cups! With fruit on the bottom! They’d be so easy in the lunchbox, and the kids like them, and look! They’re on sale!” the Nag says.

“No, no, no!” the little green angel shrieks in my other ear.

I couldn’t do it. All that garbage. And corn syrup. And the slippery slope that leads to juice boxes and snack packs.

I put quart-size containers of organic yogurt in my cart, plain for the parents, vanilla for the kids. I’ll mix theirs with fruit and divide it into little servings myself. I do the same thing with snacks — the big bag of pretzel sticks gets dumped into a big glass jar at home, and divided into snack-size reusable containers for lunch.

Still, I’m failing on the plastic front. Sure I’m not bringing home half a dozen 6-ounce plastic yogurt containers, but those quart-sized plastic containers pile up pretty quickly too. We use them for scoops for chicken feed and dog food, but eventually they are garbage. And so is the plastic bag the pound of pretzels came in. Better than a mess of little bags, but plastic garbage nonetheless.

At that same place where the cheese sticks are so cheap, they had a sale on grapes. But they came, 2 pounds each, in those plastic clamshells. More garbage. I resisted.

So what? When I came home, there was a box of produce, too old for the food pantry, that a neighbor dropped off for the chickens to eat. Six plastic clamshells of sprouts and green onions, and six more of grapes. The chickens pounced on their fruit-and-greens salad, and my husband sighed, stacked the plastic and threw it in the garbage.

We’ve cut way down on plastic grocery bags, by bringing our own reusable bags to the market, and reusing the smaller produce bags until they rip. But it took a lot longer for me to remember to bring the reusables into all stores. I still get funny looks at Stewart’s when I bring my cloth bag in to pick up milk and ice cream. Even though Stewart’s started selling reusable bags too.

And so much of what I’m putting into the reusable bag is encased in plastic anyway — coffee, shampoo, frozen juice concentrate. Some can be recycled, some can’t. Either way, the best way to eliminate it is at the source. But can enough of us avoid buying plastic-wrapped stuff to make the manufacturers change their ways?

At least I came up with a solution to the cheese stick issue since finding that wrapper in the car. Instead of just putting a slice of mozzarella into a container in the lunch box, and taking it back out at night when the lunch box comes home, I’ll make the kids cheese kabobs. Chunks of cheese and cherry tomatoes — or grapes — on a little skewer should be fun to eat in a lunch box.

As long as the tomatoes and grapes aren’t coming home in a clamshell.

Margaret Hartley is the Gazette’s Sunday and features editor. Greenpoint appears in the Gazette’s print edition Sundays on the Environment page.

Have a comment about plastic? A question or a topic you’d like addressed on Greenpoint? Email greenpoint@dailygazette.net.