Year 2, Week 38 Results: .4 oz of plastic waste.

It's 4:30am and I'm still up. So this tally post will be very short. All new plastic again this week:

• Packing tape from a package my dad sent. A late birthday present.


• Plastic bubble wrap bag from same Dad package.


• 2 plastic envelope windows. Both Financial West Group.

That's it.

Tomorrow, I'll announce the winner of the Lunchbots Duo. Stay tuned.
 

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Year 2, Week 37 Results: .3 oz of plastic waste.

All new plastic this week:

• Plastic baggie from Chinese herbs. At the recommendation of a friend, I visited a Chinese doctor last week (Dr. Ou on Grand Avenue) who performed acupuncture and massage and sent me home with a baggie of herb tea to drink twice a day. I guess I was so amped from the treatment that I didn't even think to hand back the baggie (as I would have done.) I also didn't think to ask him what was actually in the tea packets, and as there was a language barrier, I'm not sure he could have told me in English. Isn't it odd how most of us are extremely careful about what we put in our bodies and yet some of us will take "natural" remedies on faith or the advice of our friends?
  
  Some Ayurvedic medicines have been found to contain lead. Other herbal remedies are toxic in and of themselves. Here's a list of toxic Chinese herbs. But since I don't know what was in my tea, I can't know if it was completely safe or not.
  
  So what do you guys think? Would you take an herbal remedy without knowing what's in it? I confess, I drank the tea all week, and I did start to feel better. Although, today the crappy cruddy feeling seems to be back. But that might just be lack of sleep. Oh, how I wish there were a miracle remedy for THAT problem!


• 2 plastic envelope windows. Safeco Insurance and Financial West Group. Isn't it sad enough that my tiny IRA is sinking lower and lower each month? Do I have to get the news mixed with plastic?


• Plastic wrapper from around a box of new checks. Someday checks will be obsolete, right? This is the first new batch I've bought in over five years! And to tell you the truth, with the rain we've been having, I was grateful for the plastic wrap around the box.


• Plastic blister pack of night light bulbs. Using up the last incandescent night light bulb. We'll be switching to our new LED night light when this one burns out. Yes, the LED is made from plastic, but supposedly it will last way longer.

 

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Year 2, Week 36 Results: 49.6 oz of plastic waste. Why do kitties eat plastic?

Why oh why do kitties eat plastic fleece? Last August I retired a holey red fleece blanket that the kitties had been chowing down on. Now, here's the blanket we've used as a throw on our sofa for several years. I bought it long before I began avoiding new plastic. 100% polyester. Yummy!

Here's the tally:

Items bought before the plastic project began:

• 1 holey 100% polyester fleece blanket. I think this is the last plastic blanket. We have plenty of others in our home made from natural fibers. This one will be replaced with a wool blanket that Michael bought back when he first moved to the Bay Area. It's still in good shape, and so far, the kitties have not tried it for dessert. (Although we have found some suspicious holes in a pair of wool slippers I knitted for Michael, so we'll see.)


• 2 ancient ant traps. Found by the housecleaners last week while cleaning the kitchen.

New plastic waste this week:

• Plastic bag of World's Best Cat Litter. I've written before about my inability to find a plastic-free cat litter that the cats will actually use. SwheatScoop doesn't do it for them. This month, we're going to try Smart Litter Organic and Safe, which despite the plastic bag in the photo on the web site, we found in a paper bag at Pet Food Express. I notice that the web page says, "Improved packaging and formula," and I wonder if that means they are switching to plastic from paper. I'll ask the next time I'm over there.

That's it! Only 4 items this week, and only 1 of which was new.

After my Guilt & Gratitude post, Michael and I had a conversation about buying new things. He's even more frugal than I am when it comes to avoiding new purchases, preferring to support thrift stores and often bringing home the rejected items that neighbors leave out "for free." I told him about The Compact. I kind of feel like we already live a Compact-like life without joining or verbally committing to anything.

This week, I have another story to share about finding a way to avoid a new purchase. And this one doesn't involve any guilt at all.
 

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Year 2, Week 35 Results: .3 oz of plastic waste.

Happy belated Valentine's Day. If I hadn't bought a bottle of wine this week, I'd only have a few plastic windows from envelopes in my tally. And here it is.

All new plastic waste this week:

• Plastic stopper from a bottle of Gnarly Head 2006 Old Vine Zinfandel. I'll be adding this bottle to the Wine List and won't buy it again. If you weren't a Fake Plastic Fish reader when I wrote about natural cork stoppers vs. plastic stoppers, please click here.


• 4 plastic envelope windows. 3 Kaiser Permanente envelopes & 1 more Peace Action.

Back in September I wrote about learning to sleep. I still have not mastered the hang of this skill that most humans seem to perform effortlessly. But this article I recently read in Glamour Magazine (while hanging out at newsstand waiting for friends) has given me a new incentive to get more rest. Melatonin is helping, even though it comes in a plastic bottle. (Prescription sleep aids have all failed me so far. Even the one Clif recommended.)

Tomorrow, we're having our apartment professionally cleaned (for the first time) by a green cleaning company. And the next day, we're having our carpets professionally cleaned. I'm thinking that between the fleas and the viruses that I just can't seem to kick, having someone come in and give our place a thorough scrubbing is not a bad idea. I plan to write all about the green cleaning company and the methods they use in a few days.

Spring is almost here! My goal for this year: taking better care of this body that has been entrusted to me. I've been kind of neglectful lately, staying up too late, eating crap, forgetting to get out and move. No wonder I get so sick. If there were an agency called Self Protective Services, I think my self would be removed from me and placed in foster care.
 

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Year 2, Week 33 & 34 Results: 3.3 oz of plastic waste.

I missed a week while I was sick, so here is two weeks' plastic waste. This past week, I gave in to a substantial amount of new plastic, as you'll see. But I have good reasons!

First, plastic purchased before the plastic project began:

• Dry mustard container, sprinkle lid, & cap.
I used this up making homemade mustard two weeks ago. From now on, all dry mustard will be purchased from bulk bins using my own container.

New plastic waste this week:

• Clamshell from Energizer family charger. I finally used up the last of my disposable AA and AAA alkaline batteries this week. I had purchased a big box of batteries from Costco long before realizing how wasteful and toxic they are and determined that once they were gone, I'd stick to rechargeables only. So, the time has come. I wanted a good machine that would charge all sizes of batteries, and this one handles AAA, AA, C, D & 9-volt NiMH batteries. And yes, the charger itself is made of new plastic. But at least I purchased it directly from the store (Best Buy) so there wouldn't be any extra packaging waste or fuel costs.


• 3 clamshells from packages of rechargeable AAA and AA NiMH batteries. I'm hoping I won't need to buy this size again for a very, very long time.


• Plastic seal from around the neck of a glass bottle of apple cider vinegar. Used to make mustard and also to rinse my hair!


• 4 plastic envelope windows. Safeco Insurance, Financial West Group, Peace Action (I've asked this organization to stop sending me paper mail), and PG&E's year-end statement.


• Plastic from around the ends of organic bananas.


• Packing tape from delivery of something I can't even remember. I'm wracking my brain but can't think what was delivered in the last two weeks. Sometimes I scare myself.


• 2 doses of Frontline flea & tick killer for cats. *Sigh* This one makes me really, really sad. I didn't want to go the toxic route, choose the nooculer option, if you know what I mean. But the fleas are so bad in our house right now, we had no choice. So we've not only purchased Frontline to treat the cats, but also a toxic powder to treat our carpets and upholstery. We tried natural oils and bathing the kitties in peppermint soap and vacuuming and washing blankets and linens in hot water. But the fleas in this area are tough and causing a lot of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. Our cats don't ever go outside, and still they are infested. What would you do?

 

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Year 2, Week 32 Results: .9 oz of plastic waste.

Hi everybody. I'm home from Hawaii but sick again. Coughing. Fever. Chills. So this will be a quick one.

It's all new plastic waste this week:

• Trader Joe's toothpaste tube & cap. I wrote about buying this tube of toothpaste back in June. At the time, I thought I could make it last a year. It actually lasted 7 months. Not bad. I even cut it open to get out the last bits of minty goodness.


• Seal from around neck of organic peanut butter jar. Once this is used up, I'll be bringing the jar back to Whole Foods and grinding my own peanut butter.


• Plastic wrappers from 3 birthday presents. Obama calendar, Obama DVD, and Slack Key Guitar CD. These were gifts from my family.


• 3 plastic envelope windows. Kaiser Permanente, Safeco Insurance, and Financial West Group.


• Plastic cover from Equity Funds prospectus. Isn't it bad enough that my IRA is shrinking, shrinking, shrinking in this economy? I don't need shrink wrap on top of that!


• Packing tape from delivery of new laptop battery. I'm always learning. Last week I learned that you're not supposed to leave your laptop plugged in all the time if you don't want to kill your battery. *Sigh* At least the box that came from Toshiba Direct was padded with brown paper rather than Styrofoam or plastic. And it also came with an address for mailing back the old battery to be recycled.

I started posting "Ask The Expert" Q&A articles on Sustainlane this week. My first article answers the question, "Is it ever safe to store food in plastic?" Check it out while it's still there! My next article will be about what happens to our plastic recycling.
 

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Aloha! Year 2, Week 31 Results: .1 oz of plastic waste.

Here's my plastic waste for this week. See it?


This is the view from my parents' lanai. Have a closer look...


My personal plastic purchases include 3 plastic stickers from some cotton pants and the tag hangers. However, I am staying with my parents this week and eating their food, which means that plastic is involved. I'm avoiding the single-use disposables and frozen convenience foods, but that's all I'm going to say on the subject. If my dad wants to add a comment here, he's welcome to!

Saturday, we attempted to pay a visit to the sea turtles.


What we found were powerful high waves


And a turtle-free beach


A few seconds later, one of those powerful waves slapped my butt and soaked me from the waist down.



We're having a great time!
 

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Your opinions requested! Plus Year 2, Week 30 Results: 1.9 oz of plastic waste.

Here's the weekly tally. But please read down to the bottom of the page. I have an Announcement, a Survey, and a Discount Coupon for you.

Plastic used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 bottle of Gulden's spicy brown mustard. Wow. We've had this one for a long, long time. And as I wrote in my last post, I'm going to replace it with homemade mustard so as to avoid a new bottle. Will post the recipe and photos when it's done! Oh, and no lid included in the tally because while the container is plastic, its lid is metal. It will go in with my metal recycling.

New plastic waste:

• Spectrum canola oil pull tab & neck wrapper. The bottle of canola oil is glass. The cap and wrapper are plastic.


• Frontier Fair Trade Vanilla bottle label. The bottle is glass but the label is totally plastic.


• Plastic tag hanger from a new set of metal measuring spoons.


• Bandaid from pricked finger.


• 4 plastic envelope windows. ING Direct, Safeco Insurance, credit card company, and Financial West Group. I think I've been doing a pretty good job of removing myself from mailing lists, but these still linger.

Now, for the promised announcements and survey.

First, Anarres Natural Health forwarded me info on a Candadian television documentary, Forever Plastic, which will be broadcast by the CBC on Thursday January 15, 2009 at 9 pm on CBC-TV and then repeating on Saturday January 17, 2009 at 10 pm PT on CBC Newsworld. It looks like a fantastic show. Unfortunately, it seems to only be available to Canadians. Those of us outside Canada cannot even view it via the web site. Any Canadian Fake Plastic Fish readers care to watch and report back?

And finally, To-Go Ware is offering a 40% discount coupon to everyone who completes their customer opinion survey. To-Go Ware is a company that makes stainless steel to-go containers and bamboo to-go cutlery. I have both of their products and love them. They plan to expand their line, and they want your input on what types of containers are important to you. This is your chance to ask for what you want.

For example, although I generally don't store food in plastic containers, I am still using my plastic Tupperware square sandwich container because nothing else works as well for sandwiches. I let To-Go Ware know that I would love to replace it with a square stainless steel version. What's important to you? Are you looking for freezer containers? Insulated containers? Different sizes or shapes? Please weigh in and let them know.

The survey is somewhat lengthy, but the payoff is the 40% discount coupon code at the end: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=NLyXitOvZpYirlz6BX3Osg_3d_3d
 

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Year 2, Week 29 Results: 3.0 oz of plastic waste.

This will be a quick one. Trying to fit a million activities into this week and not much time to post here. But I have a lot of info to write about in the coming weeks, so please bear with me!

All my plastic waste for last week was new.

• BalanceIt bottle, cap, & scoops. This is the supplement I buy to add to my homemade cat food. This bottle lasted a little over two months. Compare this to the 21 cans and plastic shrink wrap we were going through each week, and I'm sure you'll agree it's a much better alternative. And the kitties still love the homemade food as much as they did in October. For the past two weeks, I've substituted cooked pumpkin for the sweet potato, since we had a pumpkin in our house that needed to be used in some way, and they seem to like it just as much. Pumpkin does make for a wetter food.


• Plastic packing tape & shipping label pocket from the shipment of new BalanceIt supplement. I ordered four bottles this time to save on shipping materials and costs. Shouldn't need to order again until September.


• Foam security seal from new bottle of BalanceIt.


• Plastic shipping label pocket from another Skoy cloth delivery. The original box was missing a couple of cloths, so these were sent separately. I guess I should have specified no plastic on the outside of the envelope. If you order from Skoy, perhaps you could include a note requesting no plastic UPS or mailing label pocket or plastic tape.


• 1 piece of plastic from the ends of a bunch of organic bananas. Unavoidable in these parts.


• 2 plastic envelope windows. ING Direct -- sending my new debit card -- and payment from Share-a-Sale for blog advertising. I have since requested payment via PayPal to avoid these envelopes in the future.

How has 2009 treated you so far? I'm excited for the possibilities!
 

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Year 2, Week 28 Results: 8.8 oz of plastic waste.

Well, we can't say I didn't end the year with a bang. Look at all that plastic, most of which was acquired new. And some of which is exactly the kind of packaging I routinely rail against. But I have excuses explanations for all of it, I assure you!

First, plastic used up this week that was purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 plastic bag of Ocean Spray craisins. Found in the back of the refrigerator while cleaning on Thursday. Do I know how to celebrate Christmas or what? These things expired two years ago, apparently. Dumped them into the compost and have the bag left to deal with.


• 1 bottle of Spectrum Essentials wheat germ oil & cap. Another discovery, expired and forlorn in the refrigerator. And at this point, I have no idea why I bought this stuff in the first place. I must have read that it was good for me. Any ideas?

New plastic waste:

• 1 large plastic clamshell from a new Flip Video camera. Here's where the justifying begins because this is just the kind of thing I'm always complaining about and for which I find alternatives or buy used or don't buy at all. And in fact, I didn't buy this item. I received it free from a marketing research company as part of my payment for participating in a video consumer research project.
  
  Here's the deal. I'm registered with several research companies to attend focus groups for a fee. Being opinionated has its rewards. So a few weeks ago, I got a call from one of these firms offering $200 plus a free camera for me to spend 45-60 minutes making a video of myself in my kitchen, discussing the products I buy and tools I use and then finally sharing my thoughts about a particular brand of organic canned food. It sounded like fun. I didn't think much about plastic when I agreed to do it. I believe they called during the office Christmas party, and I'd already had a glass of wine.
  
  So the camera arrives in the packaging you see in the photo. Crap. I considered sending it back and backing out of the project. After all, the camera itself is plastic and made who knows where (Wait... let me see... it's made in... China! Big surprise.) and I wouldn't need it if I would get around to having my bigger expensive video camera repaired (although, to be fair, the big expensive camera requires plastic DV cartridges, whereas the Flip doesn't require any additional media cartridges or cards at all.) Blah blah blah. I was ready to send it back, and then the light bulb went off in my head.
  
  This project could be a perfect way for me to let this particular organic foods company know how I feel, as one of their customers. To let them see a nearly zero waste kitchen, and to address the issue of BPA in their cans! I would not be sending just an email or letter, but a whole video explaining what people like me need and want. And it would not be seen by a customer service rep but a marketing department interested in what I have to say! So I decided to keep the camera and go through with the project. The extra money in no way influenced my decision. (Okay, of course it did. In the interest of full disclosure, I'd really love to have an extra $200!)
  
  I completed the video last night and am uploading it now. (It's taking hours to upload.) Tomorrow, I'll post parts of it here... the parts I can show. I probably am not allowed to tell you the name of the research company or organic foods brand, but just keep in mind that when it comes to BPA, all food cans are lined with it (organic or not) with the single exception of Eden Organic beans. The brand in the study is not Eden Organic.
  
  If you buy beans or veggies or tomato paste in cans, consider writing a letter to the company and asking them to find an alternative to BPA.


• Another plastic clamshell from a 3-pack of LED night lights. I haven't checked, but I'll bet these are the only two clamshells I've acquired all year. Could be wrong, but I can't remember any others. And once again, this was a freebie. We had a coupon for a free CFL from a local hardware store, and when Michael went to pick up the CFL, they gave him this instead.
  
  The night lights (yes, plastic) are actually really cool. Light sensors allow them to come on only when the room is dark... an energy saver for people like us who forget to turn off our night lights in the morning. And they use much less energy than the CFL we leave on in the kitchen so as not to kill ourselves in the dark. And much less than the incandescent night light bulb in the bedroom.
  
  But isn't it ironic that a product created to save energy is made from so much plastic and packaged in still more plastic? I'll be writing two letters tomorrow... to Flip Video and to Feit Electric. I'll post them here, of course.
  
  Oh, and one more thing about clamshells. Check out the benefits as listed by Blisters.com. I love number 3: Adds value to product. Really? In what universe? These packages are so hard to open, there's now a special tool you can buy just for the purpose. Exactly what value do you think they mean?


• Plastic baggies from 2 aluminum felt door sweeps & plastic packing tape from the box. I bought the door sweeps from Amazon.com because the door sweeps available locally were made from vinyl (PVC) which I just won't buy if there is a PVC-free option. Of course, they came in plastic bags with plastic tape on the box. We've already tried using a handmade draft dodger, but our cats tore it open and spilled beans all over the house. They are not very environmentally-friendly, those kitties.


• Plastic shipping tape & UPS envelope from Skoy cloth delivery. Sigh.


• 1 piece of plastic from the ends of a bunch of organic bananas. Unavoidable in these parts.


• 1 little plastic pull tab from a large metal can of soy sauce.


• 1 plastic gift wrap bag from a co-worker. The contents of which have already been re-gifted. Yes, it was plastic. And in fact, the day I received the gift, I was in an ornery mood and considered posting it on my blog and ranting about the uselessness of the present. But then I decided I didn't want to be an a**hole that day. So I didn't. Are we glad?

Okay. This year is almost finished. If I have a chance this weekend, I'll photograph and post one shot of my 2008 new plastic waste. It all fits into one big cat litter bag. I was hoping to keep it under 5 pounds for the year, but those wacky clamshells this week put me over the top. Here's hoping 2009 is even lighter!
 

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Year 2, Week 27 Results: .6 oz of plastic waste.

I failed to notice last week that another 6 months had gone by since the inception of Fake Plastic Fish. We're just swimming right along here with no end in sight. Small victories are what we are after. Step by step, day by day, people waking up to their impact on the planet and what they can do about it. If we look too far ahead, we put ourselves in danger of either becoming overwhelmed by the immensity of the problem or lulled into complacency by promises that the earth will sort itself out one way or another. And yes, that's true. The earth will be fine, no matter what we do. But life as we know it... that's another story. And that's what we work to protect moment by moment in the here and now.

Okay, enough philosophizing. Another week, another tally.

Plastic used up this week that was purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 plastic Oral B dental floss container. Okay, I'll say it. I don't floss often enough. I should have added a dental floss container to the tally long before now, shouldn't I? Perhaps I'll add "twice daily flossing" to my New Year's resolutions. Anyway, here's one used container, and I've got two more that I'm working on before I switch to nearly plastic-free dental floss:
  
  Eco-Dent floss is coated with 100% vegetable wax, and the container is made from paper-fiber. The floss inside is protected by a tiny plastic wrapper, which is significantly less plastic than that of a typical dental floss container. And yes, the floss itself is made from nylon, which is a type of plastic. However, I am not adding my used dental floss to my plastic tally. Just not. But hey, I'm not stopping anyone else from including used floss on their plastic-free blogs!
  
  

New plastic waste:

• 4 plastic envelope windows. Two from Safeco Insurance Company (I called today and found out that while they don't currently offer paperless billing, Safeco plans to go paper-free within the next 6 months) and two from Chase credit card company containing my new credit card and paper statements from the old card that was cancelled due to fraud. Crazy that I signed up for paperless statements, yet when my account was closed, I no longer had access to the online statements. Hmm... seems like they need to come up with a way to allow folks to access their records securely online even after the account is closed. Otherwise, paperless isn't really paperless in the long run.


• 1 cancelled Chase VISA card. Someone tried to order a buttload of stuff from cheapandeasydeals.com (or something like that) using my credit card number. Bad! Bad! Thankfully, Chase denied the charge and called me right away. Good! Good! (And no, I don't think it was me shopping in my sleep, but you never know.)


• 1 small plastic baggie from a gift at work. My employer gave out little stocking stuffers inside cardboard poppers. Mine was a metal shoe horn (which I actually needed) inside a plastic baggie.

So, that's it for last week. And now I'm hungry. Off to bake a potato. Mmmmmmm!
 

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Year 2, Week 26 Results: 1.8 oz of plastic waste.

It's raining and hailing and cold outside, and we still haven't turned on our central heating. As I sit here in my one-piece footie pajamas (that I've been wearing all day), fuzzy slippers, and mug of hot tea, I'm just glad I don't have to go out tonight. Oh, wait. I do. I have to go out to the ice skating party at the Embarcadero, hosted by Michael's law firm. (Apparently, it's not raining across the bay in San Francisco.) Um... on second thought, no. I'm staying in and writing up my plastic tally for last week.

Here it is!

Plastic used up this week that was purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 broken plastic slotted spoon. I've replaced it with a metal/wood version I found at a thrift store along with a few more wooden spoons for 25 cents each. As I've mentioned before, there still are quite a few durable plastic items in this house. When I made the decision to go plastic-free, the rule was no new plastic. But I didn't toss all my old plastic items and replace them with new eco varieties. How earth friendly would that be?
  
  So, while I no longer store human food in plastic containers due to concerns of chemical leaching, I do still use some plastic kitchen utensils, measuring cups, etc. If/when they break, I find plastic-free, preferably second-hand replacements.

New plastic waste:

• 1 plastic envelope window. Chase Rewards refund check. I guess I should send letters to my credit card companies asking them to forego plastic windows. If someone wanted to get my credit card number, a plastic window is not going to stop them. In fact, it didn't stop them last week when that very thing happened. Waiting for a new credit card in the mail. *Sigh* More new plastic.


• 1 kitty prescription bottle & cap. This one should have been included in the tally weeks ago after Arya had the pin removed from her leg.


• 1 bit of plastic from the ends of a bunch of organic bananas.

Brrr... it's chilly. Need hot cocoa. Plastic-free cocoa from the bulk bin at Rainbow Grocery. With sugar from the bulk bin at Whole Foods. Mmmm...
 

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Contest Winner. Year 2, Week 25 Results: 1.4 oz of plastic waste.

Wow. Is it Tuesday already? Busy, busy week. And not much time for blogging. I was surprised that so many people knew that Icon is the name of Madonna's fan club. And then I remembered Google. Right. How many of you actually new the answer to last week's question without looking it up?

So anyway, Kim is the winner because she answered correctly first. So Kim, please email me at beth[at]fakeplasticfish[dot]com with your contact info and mailing address. I have some questions for you.

And now, the tally...

Plastic used up this week that was purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 Sicilia lemon juice bottle and cap. This is the last plastic-bottled lemon juice in the house! Used medicinally for the last couple of weeks. Fresh lemons only here on out.

New plastic waste:

• 1 plastic envelope window. Financial West Group statement. They do not yet offer online statements.


• 1 codeine cough syrup bottle & cap. Was good while it lasted.


• 1 plastic soy sauce cup. Had sushi with our karaoke Sunday night. The food came on durable trays, but the soy sauce was served in little plastic cups. Noticed too late to refuse the cup beforehand. But the karaoke was great fun and left no plastic waste!

This week is busy, but I do have a couple of posts in me... more plastic-free bloggers to write about as well as the Day Without A Bag campaign. Stay tuned...
 

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Another silly contest. Year 2, Week 24 Results: 2.2 oz of plastic waste.

Feeling much better this week, thanks to a lot of sleep, hot water, and Thanksgiving dinner! (Thanksgiving dinner is good for everything, right?) I'm late posting the tally this week because Michael and I went for a bike ride yesterday which left me so exhausted, I fell into bed and slept for 14 hours straight. But, Michael tells me, we have a rule in our house that no one ever has to apologize for sleeping too much. Wouldn't you like to live here?

So, here we go. Plastic used up this week that was purchased before the plastic project began:

• 3 credit & membership cards. Chase VISA, expired; Cala foods card, expired. One fan club membership card, kind of embarrassing. I'll send a prize to whomever can figure out what fan club is represented by the card in the lower left corner. Certain people are not allowed to answer: Mark, Red, and possibly Michael (although he might not know the answer.) I used to be a crazed fan of this person and collected every magazine they ever appeared in... which were many. I wanted to be this person when I grew up. And you know, in a way, I have. In my own mind of course.
  
  So okay, I'll send a prize to the winner... my choice. And since this is a silly contest, it will be a silly random surprise. Are you up for it?


• 2 prescription bottles and 2 lids. Prescription strength generic ibuprofen... NOT MOTRIN... and another drug I took for anxiety. Have given up all anti-anxiety meds now. No more emotional crutches. Learning to cope through meditation and mindfulness and occasional bouts of therapeutic crying. Works for me so far.

New plastic waste:

• 3 plastic envelope windows. AT&T promotion, which I've requested be stopped; Annual Social Security Statement; New Chase credit cards. I get all my statements online, but the cards themselves come in a plastic window envelope.


• 2 plastic ties attaching my new metal bicycle cup holder to the backing card. This cup holder rocks. It fits my travel mug perfectly and keeps it upright. I know it might seem silly to some serious bicyclists, but my bike is about getting around town, running errands, and having fun... doing the things that people in cars would do. And you know how important a good cup holder is in a car! This is a Felt brand aluminum cup holder I got at Tip Top Bike Shop in North Oakland yesterday. It's simple functionality makes me really, really happy.


• 2 more plastic ties attached to the new tire pump I also bought yesterday. I couldn't get the hang of squeezing my tires to check the pressure. I wanted a pump with a gauge to let me know when the tire was full. This was the original reason I went into the bike shop... that, and we had a coupon that expired yesterday.

I have a feeling I won't be buying too many more new things in the coming weeks. The economy is scary right now. Saving money seems even more important than ever.

Are you guys affected by the recession and credit crunch? Fortunately, Michael and I have never carried credit card debt (actually, when we first got together 8 years ago, I was heavily in debt and working my way out. Since getting rid of my personal debt, we've been able to pay off our cards 100% each month and put money towards retirement, money that's taken a nose-dive in the last few months, but I'm told by my financial advisor not to worry about it since it's long term investment.)

I know we have it easier than most financially since we don't have children or home or car payments. Our biggest expense is food. But this financial stability all rests on our keeping our jobs. Who knows how secure we are really?

Are you guys worried? Have you taken steps to ensure that you and your families are taken care of if you were to lose your job? Have you cut back on expenses? Have you found ways to be frugal AND green? Your comments are welcome!
 

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Sickness: Not so eco-friendly, actually. Year 2, Week 23 Results: 8.4 oz of plastic waste.

I haven't acquired this much new plastic waste (by weight) since August 24, week of the holey polar fleece blanket.

I started feeling crappy late Sunday night. Wednesday morning, I woke up with a fever of 102°F. As it climbed rapidly over the next hour, I was a quivering mess of chills and aches, barely able to think or even dress myself. Michael took off work to help me get to Kaiser, where a chest X-ray revealed pneumonia.

I returned home with a bag of plastic bottles (not included in this week's tally because I'm still working on them) and collapsed on the couch, begging the husband before passing out, "Please get me some Chinese soup from Becky's. And I don't care if they put it in plastic." (Grammarians, was that a dangling modifier?)

And boy, did I ever end up with plastic, as you'll see in the tally below. All new plastic waste:

• 4 plastic soup containers & 4 lids. We ordered 1 large won ton soup and 1 large hot & sour soup. We didn't realize that large meant LARGE.


• 4 plastic bags, 1 around each soup container. And they were necessary too because the containers leaked like crazy. Wondering why Becky's doesn't find a more effective way to package soup. As I recall, those cardboard cartons didn't used to leak. And I'm not even worried about what could have been leaching from the plastic into the hot soup. When you're too sick to stand up, you have other priorities.


• Kaiser ID bracelet from the Radiology department. I don't know why the bracelet was necessary. When I get other types of X-rays (mammography, etc.) I don't receive a bracelet. But this chest X-ray was performed in the hospital itself, where perhaps ID bracelets are standard procedure.


• 1 blister pack of Azithromycin antibiotic tablets & 2 blister packs of pain meds.


• 2 plastic trays & 1 plastic wrapper from a new HP print cartridge. This was from Monday afternoon -- before hell broke loose. Office Max kept my old print cartridge to return to HP for recycling.


• 1 plastic wrist band from the SF Green Festival. Should have been included in the tally last week.


• 1 plastic seal from around the neck of a glass bottle of Frontier fair trade vanilla extract. I opened this one on Monday to make homemade chocolate syrup. Will post the recipe this week.

Being sick has been less than ecologically kind in the paper department as well. I used up the few actual Kleenex tissues I had left in the house and then went through a roll and a half of Seventh Generation recycled toilet paper. Cloth handkerchiefs just don't cut it in these situations.

Is this too much information? Just wait until I tell you about our cat litter fiasco! And I have not forgotten about the Contest. I plan to write about the SF Green Festival tomorrow.
 

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A Teaser, a Contest, an Announcement, & Year 2, Week 22 Results: 1.0 oz of plastic waste.

Like last week, I have a bunch of business before the tally.

Teaser: Brita's going to take back and recycle their pitcher filter cartridges!

I received a phone call on Friday (while hanging out at the SF Green Festival) from Drew McGowan, Brita brand manager, alerting me that Brita will indeed begin taking back and recycling pitcher filters beginning in January!

He sent me a copy of the full press release with details, but I've promised not to reveal specifics until Tuesday. What I will tell you is that they seem to have incorporated almost all the elements of our petition in coming up with a solution that keeps jobs here in the U.S. and doesn't rely on shipping the plastic off to China.

Please visit our Take Back The Filter campaign web page on Tuesday for full details of the program. And you can stop sending us your filters. Hooray! Hold onto them until January, when you'll be able to send them in directly for recycling.

Now... we just have to work on Pur and all the other water filter companies...

Contest: What's wrong with this picture?


This is the waste station at the SF Green Festival this weekend: bins for garbage (landfill), compost (the green bin), recycling, and liquids. It's typical of all the stations throughout the event, and there's one thing that doesn't seem right about it. Can you tell what it is? I'll be posting about the Green Festival on Wednesday or Thursday and will discuss this issue. The person who guesses correctly will receive a copy of the Toolbox For Sustainable City Living, by Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew. If there is more than one correct answer, I'll choose randomly.

Announcements: A Carnival and a Conference Call

Come back tomorrow for the 154th Carnival of the Green hosted right here on Fake Plastic Fish.

Then, this Thursday, November 20: Pandora’s Plastic Box - A Conference Call For All.

Healthy Child Healthy World will be hosting the first in a monthly series of conference calls on health and environmental issues. This Thursday, the theme is plastic:

Join us for an open, non-judgmental conversation about plastics (we all have our Achilles’ Heel). Janelle from Healthy Child Healthy World will be giving a quick background on the issue; Jennifer from The Smart Mama will share her Journey to Glass; Jeremiah from ZRecs will talk about assessing the risks and benefits of plastics, and how bloggers can influence corporate behavior and affect change in the marketplace; and Beth from Fake Plastic Fish will discuss the impacts on the environment and living without.

I hope many of you will be able to join in the call to listen and discuss! Here's the call info:

When: November 20, 10am PST
Dial: (218) 339-3600
Access Code: 1036416#

The Tally:



Plastic items used this week but acquired before the plastic project began:

• 1 more dirty, scrungy, chewed up synthetic sponge. At the point they start falling apart and little pieces of plastic sponge wash down the drain, it's time to put them to rest.

New plastic waste:

• 1 plastic pizza thingie from the previous week. FPF reader Froghair took issue with my statement last week that planned to return this thing to the pizzeria and ask them to reuse it. She wrote, "Pardon my skepticism, but do you really think the pizza place is just going to pop that plastic thingie back in their bin and reuse it? Frankly, I hope not, because that's got to be a health code infraction, even if it is washed." She's probably right. So, into Plastic Purgatory it goes, and I will just have to be more conscientious about remembering to request no plastic in the middle of my pizza!


• 1 plastic RX bottle and cap. From Kaiser. We can't return them to be refilled here.


• Wrapper from a Kaiser plastic pill cutter. My doctor gave it to me. I wouldn't normally have accepted it. And in fact, when the pharmacist has tried to give me a plastic pill cutter in the past, I've refused, saying that I'm perfectly capable of cutting a pill with a sharp knife. But when my doctor and I decided that I need only be taking 1/4 of the sleeping pill I use occasionally, I realized a knife was not going to do it. The pills are very small. I really don't think I can cut them into quarters with a kitchen knife without ending up with a powdery mess. So I accepted this chunk of plastic and its wrapper with a sigh. We do what we can and then...

 

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More sad plastic news. Plus Year 2, Week 21 Results: .05 oz of plastic waste.

The format of this post will be a little different from most of my weekly tallies because I want to emphasize three stories in the news this week which illustrate more of the problems with plastic and plastic recycling.

First: I learned from JessTrev of The Green Phone Booth (via Twitter) that one of the few plastics we had thought was fairly safe might not be so. According to Toronto's Globe and Mail on Friday, medical researchers at the University of Alberta have found chemicals leaching from polypropylene (#5 plastic), the type of plastic used for many, many food uses, including yogurt tubs and laptop lunch containers, which parents purchase as an alternative to disposable food containers for children. Preserve toothbrushes (the kind I use) are also made from recycled polypropylene.

Not enough is know at this time about the two chemicals found to leach from the plastic, quaternary ammonium biocides and oleamide, to determine whether or not the leaching poses health risks, but Rebecca Sutton, senior scientist with Environmental Working Group, says, "We simply don't want these chemicals getting into our bodies."

When asked which plastics are safe for food, I've always replied that #2, #4, and #5 are the safest as far as we know, but the fact that they haven't really been studied as thoroughly as other plastics means that we don't know for sure if they are actually safe. As it turns out, we're now even less sure. My opinion? Why store food in plastic when we can use glass and other safer alternatives?

Second: Saturday afternoon, a massive fire broke out at a plastics manufacturing plant in Channelview, Texas. View video and news coverage of the fire here. According to an article on Click2Houston.com, the plant manufactured polyethylene and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) products. Ironically, according to the news story, city officials claim the smoke was non-toxic.

Really? Non-toxic PVC smoke? According to Greenpeace, smoldering PVC gives off hydrogen chloride, "a corrosive, highly toxic gas that can cause skin burns and severe long-term respiratory damage," as well as dioxin, which has been found to cause cancer and reproductive disorders. How is it possible that the smoke from a burning PVC plant can be considered safe for any town?

Third: Tonight, FPF reader Christy B alerted me to a 60 Minutes story that aired today revealing a terrible reality of electronics and plastic "recycling" that will turn your stomach. You already saw the Sky News story about plastic recycling in China. This one is even worse. Watch it below or view it on the 60 Minutes site. This story illustrates why cutting our consumption and requiring manufacturers to produce less toxic, longer-lasting products is essential.


Watch CBS Videos Online

And now that you've had your fill of reasons to cut out plastic, here's my tally for the week.



All new plastic waste:

• 1 plastic envelope window. From Financial West Group, which does not yet offer electronic statements.


• 1 plastic seal from a carton of Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey. This happened Tuesday night. I blame election anxiety. What a rush!

And that's it. I actually did also receive a free T-shirt in a bubble mailer with plastic tape, but I returned it to the sender after sending an email explaining why. I also received one of those plastic pizza inserts, but I'm planning to take it back to the pizzeria and ask them to reuse it. It's actually unnecessary. I usually remember to request no plastic thingie, and the pizza arrives just fine.
 

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Year 2, Week 20 Results: 4.0 oz of plastic waste.

Oy! Too much plastic this week. You'd think that I wouldn't have brought back plastic from a meditation retreat. And you would be wrong.

Here's the tally:

Plastic items used this week but acquired before the plastic project began:

• 1 expired Chase VISA card. Wondering if these cards will be biodegradable eventually. Like some gift cards these days. Or renewable without having to destroy the old card?

And the new plastic waste:

• 1 big World's Best Cat Litter bag. We went back to SwheatScoop this week, even though I don't really like it, to save the plastic. And then Soots, who seemed to have grown out of the habit, pooped on the floor. *Sigh* I think little kitty likes the World's Best Cat Litter better. I tried explaining to him about plastic, but he didn't understand because he's... you know... a cat. Also, the corn litter just smells better. Maybe we'll try mixing the two kinds and see what happens.
  
  And yes, I said I'd try making my own newspaper litter like Allie does, but first things first. Let me get in the habit of making their food first!


• Packing tape from two packages sent to me this week. I'm going to have to start spreading the word about paper packing tape.


• 3 plastic envelope windows. From Chase VISA, Financial West Group, & Kaiser Permanente. All mailings I can't avoid.


• Bandaid from Red Cross blood donation. It should have been included in the tally a few weeks ago. I also end up with a long plasticky bandage wrapped around my arm, but instead of taking a new one each time, I bring back the old one and ask them to reuse it. And yes, they look at me like I'm nuts.


• Plant identification stake. From squash plant. Not reusable because it's printed on both sides. Next year, I'm going to grow veggies from seeds and avoid all plastic.


• 1 Snyder's pretzel bag. Thursday night, I got to my meditation retreat center too late for dinner and was starving. I grabbed a bag of pretzels from the snack table to tide me over until the next day.


• 1 Hershey's miniature chocolate bar wrapper. The second night of the meditation retreat being Halloween, our retreat leader Jon showed up in bunny ears and a cotton tail and passed out candy bars. How could I say no?

I just got back from phone banking at the Obama campaign. The first time I've ever done this in my life. Enjoying listening to George Lakoff on NPR as I write this. Looking forward to tomorrow's results. Hoping my candidate wins and that the Propositions I care the most about win and fail in the ways I want. But mostly, being grateful that finally the suspense will be over and we can get on with the work ahead, regardless of the results.
 

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Year 2, Week 19 Results: 1.5 oz of plastic waste. No more cat food cans!

Oh joy! I made up a batch of homemade cat food for Soots and Arya yesterday, and they love it. Now I'm their favorite human, not Michael. I'll write up a complete post with the recipe later this week. I'm just tickled that this week's plastic cat food wrapper will the the last one for a while.

Here's the tally:

Plastic items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 plastic label, cap, and spray tip from a can of Tile & Grout Magic. I have pretty much switched to all-natural cleaning products: vinegar, baking soda, etc. And I've given away a lot of my old cleaning supplies on Freecycle. But this can was almost empty, so I decided to use it up this weekend. Didn't work so great anyway!


• Plastic smiley face covering from a pencil. I've had this new, unsharpened smiley-face pencil sitting in the pencil holder for a couple of years. Don't remember where it came from. I had no idea the smiley face designs all over it were actually a plastic wrapper covering the pencil until I finally sharped the pencil a few days ago and noticed what looked like little bits of plastic. So I started peeling the plastic away from the pencil, and peeled the whole thing off. Great. Just what we need. Otherwise compostable pencil shavings full of plastic bits. The lesson: Be careful when buying colorfully-designed pencils. They could be coated with plastic.

And the new plastic waste:

• 1 outer wrapper from a case of Instinct canned cat food. Like I said, this should be the last one for a while. I don't want to jinx myself by saying "forever." We still have 17 cans left as backup for those times when we're too tired or busy to make the food from scratch. But I'm hoping to get in a rhythm of making their food every Saturday so that eventually canned food becomes a distant memory.


• 1 foam insert from a bottle of Balance It homemade cat food supplement. The homemade cat food will not be completely plastic-free. I do have to add some supplements to make sure the kitties get all the nutrients they need. But the supplements come mixed together in one big bottle that will last at least two months, so we'll be going through much less packaging waste than before.


• Packing tape and plastic address label pouch from the shipment of Balance It supplement. Unfortunately, the supplement is not sold in stores. It's made by the department of veterinary medicine at U.C. Davis and must be mail-ordered. Next time, I will order multiple containers so that they can all be shipped in the same box and reduce shipments and packaging. One nice thing is that there wasn't any plastic packaging inside the box.

That's it for last week's plastic. Like I said, I'll write a full post with the cat food recipe and info on supplements later this week. And I'm sure some of you cat-owners will have your own advice to share.
 

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Year 2, Week 18 Results: .9 oz of plastic waste. Monday Lessons.

Here is what I learned on Monday:

1) If the Red Cross's finger prick test reveals that my iron count is below the allowable level for donating, do not exclaim, "Why of course!" when the technician asks if it would be okay for someone else to come in and re-do the test, just to make sure. Instead, get up from the desk and walk away. It's not worth spending the remainder of the day on the couch freezing and unable to think a coherent thought simply because the second test came out just barely over the allowable level. Hmmm... my blood didn't change in one minute. What did?

2) If I am laid up on the couch unable to think a coherent thought, do not allow rascally kitties to write my entire post in LOLspeak, giving headaches and big groans to some Fake Plastic Fish readers. Realization: Even though icanhascheezburger.com routinely saves our marriage, Michael and I must recognize that not everyone in the universe thinks it's as charming as we do.

3) The new restaurant, Flavors of India, at College and Alcatraz is awesome. Really. And I didn't notice any plastic. But then, I was focusing on not passing out on their floor after my blood donation, so I could've missed something.

What did you learn on Monday?

Now, for the tally. All new plastic waste:

• 1 plastic envelope window. From my Election ballot. Need to get that sucker filled out!


• 1 plastic cap and threaded neck from a metal container of grapeseed oil. The metal container is fully recyclable except for these little plastic parts.


• 1 plastic tag from a new Saraye tatami purse. I so rarely buy myself brand new luxuries, but I really wanted a nice purse made from natural materials that could look dressy (mine is all black) and at the same time fit my coffee mug and other reusable containers. This little tag was the only piece of plastic on the whole thing. Even the inside is lined with cotton fabric.


• Plastic seal from around a pint of Ben & Jerry's coffee Heathbar crunch. Bless me, readers, for I have sinned. Michael brought it into the house, but I was the one who ripped into it and ate the whole thing. And that was before the blood donation scenario, so I knew what I was doing. I have no good excuse. I think the little gremlin on my shoulder was particularly loud that day.


• 1 outer wrapper from a case of Instinct canned cat food. At least SootsnArya were right about my plan to make their food from scratch. As I wrote in May, the nutrition clinic at U.C. Davis would not recommend a homemade diet for kittens under one year old. So now that they've come of age, I plan to contact the clinic again about homemade food... in an effort to eliminate cans lined with BPA and the outer plastic wrapper surrounding every case.

Good night. And check out the right sidebar: the Plastic-free Posse is growing! More on that later this week.
 

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Year 2, Week 17 Results: .2 oz of plastic waste.

I just got back from an inspiring weekend in Orange County, CA. Earth Resource Foundation held its first "No Plastic Left Behind" conference for its Campaign Against the Plastic Plague. What was truly exciting were the number of high school and college students who made the choice to spend an entire Saturday in classrooms learning about plastics and planning strategies and campaigns for their schools and communities. I'll talk about the conference more tomorrow.

For now, here's the weekly tally.

All new plastic waste:

• 2 plastic envelope windows. Both are notices from USE credit union.


• 1 plastic drinking straw. Arriving at the restaurant in Orange County Friday night for the speaker dinner, I discovered that each of us had already been served iced water with plastic straws. This is what I get for being late. No chance to request my water without a straw.


• 1 ball of plastic food wrap. Earth Resource Foundation tried very hard to provide us a zero waste lunch on Saturday, but the message did not get through completely to the caterer. Stephanie ordered "wrap sandwiches" thinking that way we wouldn't need any utensils. I guess the caterer heard "wrap" and decided to double-wrap the wrap sandwiches in both paper and plastic. Ah well. The best laid plans...

Going to bed early tonight. Will write more about the conference as well as a bit about plastic-free traveling tomorrow. And I'll reveal the winner of the Sierra Club book on Wednesday.

Those who live in the SF Bay Area, please don't forget the presentation tomorrow night at the Marin Humane Society by Anna and Marcus from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation. I've been told they will be showing some pictures and objects from the North Pacific Gyre that will shock us into action!
 

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Year 2, Week 16 Results: .7 oz of plastic waste. Cool music video.

Why oh why do kitties like to chew on plastic? Arya had X-rays today. She's healing well but has to wait a couple of weeks to get the pin removed from her leg. Feisty girl. Broken bone didn't stop her from jumping up on top of the refrigerator after she got home. A few more weeks of cage, I'm afraid.

News: Take Back The Filter campaign in the NY Times today! Michael was excited to be photographed by the NY Times this weekend while I was away at a meditation retreat. Can you find little black kitty Soots hiding in the photo?

Stay tuned after the plastic tally for a music video that was sent to me today to bring awareness to the problems of plastic in the oceans.

All new plastic waste:

• 3 plastic envelope windows. Notices from Financial West Group, AT&T, & Kaiser Permanente. There were a few solicitations from organizations this week, too, but I sent them back requesting to be removed from the paper mailing list.


• 1 outer wrapper from a case of Instinct canned cat food. Maybe we could get away with just feeding Arya the outer wrapper since she finds it so delicious. Nom nom nom.

Enjoy Micah Wolf's "One by One" music video which was created with the help of the Algalita Marine Research Foundation.


 

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Year 2, Week 15 Results: 1.3 oz of plastic waste. Plastic on TV.

Do any of you watch the Showtime TV show Weeds? Have you ever noticed that Mary Louise Parker has a permanent straw stuck in her mouth? And that the straw is almost always coming out of a plastic cup? I just finished the 3rd season on DVD, and I don't know if it's a result of my recent plastic awareness or if some coffee company is sponsoring the show, but it seems like this season is all about disposable plastic cups and the accompanying loud slurping and slushing sounds of straw and ice. I wonder how many plastic cups and straws they go through on that set each day.

Granted, Weeds is about a woman in the suburbs dealing marijuana, so you might think there are bigger issues to worry about than the disposable plastic. But the debate over the legality of mind-altering herbs is beyond the scope of this blog. And it would be pretty funny to send a letter to the show complaining about the example they are setting for our young people by promoting cold drinks in plastic cups with plastic straws, wouldn't it?

Okay, enough of that silliness. Here's the tally:

Plastic items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 disposable ink pen. As most of you know, I have switched to a Lamy refillable fountain pen instead of disposables or even fountain pens with disposable cartridges. Still, there are pens in our house from before, and they occasionally get used when the fountain pen isn't handy.


• 1 expired Discover card. Hmm... I've seen compostable gift cards. I wonder if credit cards will ever be made to break down in a compost facility.

And the new plastic waste:

• 2 plastic envelope windows. Notices from ING Direct and AT&T. I am trying as hard as I can to get off mailing lists, but I don't think I can do anything about these.


• 1 plastic wrapper over a Financial West Group investment report. Argh. A month ago I wrote to FWG and even sent them back a stack of their plastic. Haven't heard anything back. Wondering if I should find time to follow up. Wondering if it would make any difference.


• 1 outer wrapper from a case of Instinct canned cat food. The cats are almost a year old. Time to go back to investigating making their food from scratch.


• 1 plastic sample container & spoon. Here is where I hang my head. But not too low because I'm only 60% sorry. Strolling through the Rockridge street festival this afternoon, I stopped to watch a cooking demonstration. The chef from Pasta Pomodoro was making my favorite dish in the whole world: risotto. I wanted to see if a professional did it any different from the way I do.
  
  Turns out, he does. He uses a hell of a lot of butter and cheese. (I think that if you cook the rice properly, it's creamy enough without any butter or cheese at all... just a bit of olive oil. Oh, and wine, which adds to the yumminess if not the actual creaminess.) So I shouldn't have been too tempted by the samples they gave out at the end of the demo. But come on... how often do you walk down the street and have someone hand you a mini bowl of risotto? I enjoyed every buttery spoonful.

We ate tomatoes from our garden tonight. And have been all week. Finally. I know I said last week I'd post an update. Tomorrow, I promise!
 

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Year 2, Week 14 Results: 2.2 oz of plastic waste. Ice Cream Party!

I am late getting last week's plastic tally up. But you would be too if you were busy tallying and labeling and adding to a spreadsheet all the Brita filters that people were sending you from all over North America. I have no choice; I'm an accountant to the core and find a good spreadsheet to be a thing of beauty.

So, now that I'm finished for the moment with that particular work of art, here's last week's plastic tally, which includes a bunch more things I found while cleaning out a bathroom cabinet.

Plastic items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• Caps from 4 sample tubes of Renova skin treatment. Got these from a dermatologist years and years ago. The tubes are metal, but the caps are plastic. None of them have been opened. Technically, this stuff is a drug (you need a prescription for it) so I'll see if I can return it to Elephant Pharmacy or other place that takes back old medication.


• 2 bottles of Voltaren ophthalmic drops with caps. Also never opened and also a drug to be returned.


• 1 piece of scotch tape from outer box of Voltaren drops.


• 1 bottle of Zymar ophthalmic drops and cap. Antibiotic drops for eyes. Old drug return.


• 1 bottle of Clerz and 1 bottle of Muro eye drops plus caps. Old eye drops that are basically salt water. I poured them down the drain. I sure have had my share of eye issues.


• 1 sample of Body Shop eye supplement & cap. Never used.


• Another used up nasty synthetic sponge. Green Bean, if you think you can get some more use out of it, I'll totally mail it to you. If you can get out the slime that is deeply embedded in this thing, you are truly a super hero.

And the new plastic waste (the fun part!):

• 5 plastic rings from around the necks of jars of Fudge IS My Life fudge sauce and 1 plastic ring from a carton of Bud's ice cream.
  
  
  We had an ice cream party to use up the rest of the fudge sauce! We invited our friends to bring ice cream, and we provided dark chocolate, chocolate orange, chocolate mint, and chocolate ginger fudge sauces as well as butterscotch sauce and chopped nuts. The only thing missing was whipped cream, but really no one missed it until I thought of it just now.
  
  Yes, the ice cream cartons are lined with plastic, for those who weren't here when this fact was first revealed. And no, I don't tally them. (See the explanation here.) They go in our city's green compost bin. It's a gray area. We could make our own ice cream, but there would still be plastic in the milk or cream container: either a plastic-lined cardboard carton or a glass bottle with a plastic cap. Dairy is never plastic-free in these parts.
  
  So, this ends the ongoing litany of fudge sauce plastic seals! (Dad, do not get any bright ideas about sending more. My body can't take it!) It has been quite the decadent summer. But fall is here. Time to slow down with the sweets and get with the exercise program. Now that I'm sleeping better, I need to start moving my body again.


• Plastic cap from a glass bottle of Spectrum almond oil. I can't find the plastic insert that the cap twists onto. Why do these things need to be plastic in the first place? But I found a great stopper for the bottle in my wine cork stash: a champagne cork that was not too narrow or too fat. It's a much better solution than plastic anyway.


• 1 blister sample pack of sleeping pills (the kind that Clif takes!) Yep, I found a drug to help me sleep for now. We'll see if I need it forever. Maybe not. Maybe just until I develop some good habits. Or maybe I will. I don't have the prejudice against psychotropic drugs that some people do. To be quite honest, a few of them saved my life several years ago. I'm all for the natural solutions -- exercise, diet, meditation, etc. -- but some people are just born with the funkiest of brain chemistry and it definitely runs in my family. This is not a confession. It's a fact of life.


• And finally, plastic window from an ING Direct envelope. I get my statements online, but for some reason, there are a few notices they will only send through the mail.

Thanks for your patience these days. I'm getting a lot of sleep and other work done. Tomorrow, Allie has graciously written a guest post about plastic use during her travels. Thank you, Allie!

What else this week? Maybe a follow-up on tomato travails and other gardening issues. You could use a good laugh, right?
 

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Year 2, Week 13 Results: 2.9 oz of plastic waste. Junk mail mad house.

I give up. You'll see why below...

Plastic items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 broken spray nozzle. Lesson learned: do not add ground cinnamon (or any other ground spice, probably) to a solution you plan to spray from a plastic bottle. The cinnamon clogs up the works. And I, trying to force the liquid out, squeezed too hard and broke the danged sprayer. Sigh. I haven't added the bottle itself to the tally because I'm hoping to find another spray nozzle to fit it. This was the bottle I was using for my homemade ant spray concoction. (Supposedly, ants don't like cinnamon.) It's better to put a whole cinnamon stick in the bottle than the ground stuff. But that's not what I meant about giving up.


• 1 prescription bottle & cap. Used up finally. As I've said before, these bottles are not refillable in California.

And the new plastic waste:

• 27 plastic envelope windows! Yes, I did just sit on the floor and methodically remove each plastic window from 27 envelopes. It was a kind of Zen experience. (Not really, but it's fun to say it.) THIS is what I mean about giving up. These envelopes fit into the category of "Who the heck am I kidding?" Back in December, I wrote that I was going to mail back plastic window envelopes containing junk mail to the original senders with a note (which I have been doing) and keep the rest to reuse.
  
  But, in reality, the envelopes have just been piling up and doing no good for anyone. I have reused a few. But I rarely send paper mail anymore. All my bank statements and monthly bills are now available online, so as much as I can, I've stopped the paper mail. I don't send checks through the mail, opting for electronic payments. So the few envelopes that do come (from Financial West Group, to whom I wrote last month, ING Direct, which still sends the occasional notice through the mail, and assorted other random companies or organizations) sit in a pile and gather dust.
  
  I've been methodically reducing the amount of mail I receive in general, by signing up with companies like Green Dimes, Pro Quo, and Catalog Choice, that help to eliminate junk mail, and also by calling the senders directly or using their own pre-paid envelopes to send their mailings (including plastic window envelopes) back to them.
  
  Sadly, the biggest battle I've had has been with an organization I totally support: Planned Parenthood. Eight of the 27 envelopes shown above were from Planned Parenthood, and those were the ones I finally held onto after sending probably 15-20 of them back with messages requesting no more paper mail. Planned Parenthood was sending at least one or two pieces of mail per week. I wrote, and I called, and I pleaded with their phone solicitors to take me off the paper mailing list, to no avail. Aside from environmental concerns, I was unhappy that they were spending all my contribution money to send me letters asking for more!
  
  I stopped mailing their solicitations back finally and started just collecting them, planning to send a whole boxful to the Executive Director if the barrage didn't stop. Yes, I was going a little crazy. Ask Michael. But I never had to take that step. Because somehow, finally, I talked to the right person who was able to make the flood of mail stop. And now I am sane again.
  
  Except I'm starting to get a little worried about my good friend Barack Obama. Gotta nip that one in the bud right away. E-mails every day I can handle. Phone calls -- whatever. But paper mail -- Just say no!
  
  And about the remaining paper envelopes left after removing the plastic windows... I've cut them up to use for scratch paper: "To Do" lists, phone messages, notes to Michael. I think those are good intermediate uses before finally recycling them.


• 1 plastic cover from a Parnassus Funds prospectus. Come on folks! California's having a drought! You don't have to send our mail in plastic. It will arrive just fine. Plus, how many of your customers actually read these things anyway? (Yes, we know we should. But we don't understand them. And we don't want to understand them. And Dad, if you're reading this [or anyone else who is more fiscally responsible than I], feel free to leave your snarkiest comment.) I'm curious about a lot of things in this world, but even though I do accounting for a living, reading investment reports makes my brain bleed out through my ears. It's not pretty. Besides, that's what awesome Ian is for.


• Yet another plastic seal from around the neck of a jar of Fudge Is My Life. I wouldn't have eaten this if the other two people who won the fudge sauce had emailed me their addresses. Not my fault really.


• Plastic tag from a new lemon squeezer. I didn't realize it was plastic until I got it home! Thought the tag was paper. And I've been wanting one of these manual lemon squeezers for sooooo long! I have an electric lemon juicer I got from someone on Freecycle last year, and it kinda sucks, so it's going back up on Freecycle tonight. In many cases, manual tools seem to do a better job than electric. Can openers. Push mowers. And theoretically, handwashing dishes, but I'm closing that can-o-worms right now! (Please don't open it up again. You know who you are.)

That's all for now. Be sure and tune in tomorrow for the 3rd monthly Carnival of Trash, which will be hosted right here.
 

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Year 2, Week 12 Results: 1.0 oz of plastic waste. Plus questions about Sunscreen.

Just woke up from a long summer's nap. Here's the tally. But please stick around for a few questions afterward.

Plastic items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 2 filthy skanky disgusting synthetic sponges. I think I've gotten way more use out of them than they were ever meant to have. We still have a few more synthetic sponges in the house before switching to 100% natural sponges, wich we use for the few dishes that we hand wash. The synthetic sponges are for the more icky jobs, usually involving cats in some way.

And the new plastic waste:

• 1 plastic seal from around the neck of a jar of Fudge Is My Life. I think I've got 4 jars left from the case my dad sent. And no, I didn't eat it all, although I could have.


• Plastic packing tape from a package received this week.


• Plastic from around a stainless steel container which was shipped in above package. I plan to write more about the container this week.

So, here's my question. It's about sunscreen, which I hardly ever use even though I know all about the dangers of skin cancer. The laziness that makes me "green" by default because I can't be bothered to put makeup on my face or use other girlie skin products is the same laziness that results in way too much unprotected sun exposure than this white girl should be allowed.

So anyway, I was going through cabinets in my house doing a routine plastic purge, and I found 4 nearly full plastic bottles of sunscreen. I looked up Enviroblog's article How To Choose A Better Sunscreen and found that all 4 of them fell squarely in the bad category, containing either oxybenzone or benzophenone-3. Mere hours after listing them on Freecycle, they were gone. I should have taken a picture, but I can tell you the brands were Coppertone, Banana Boat, No Ad, and Swim n' Surf, and each container held about 8 ounces of product.

Question: Is it wrong of me to give away a product on Freecycle if I've read that it contains ingredients that might not be good for my health? If so, what should I have done with it? If not, why not?

The next day, I popped over to Whole Foods with EWG's Sunscreen Guide in hand to replace the previous products. But what I found took my breath away... they were HELLA expensive! I expected the healthier products to be somewhat more pricey. But holy cow! The tiny 2.9 ounce container of all natural Badger brand sunscreen cost nearly $16! EWG says to apply sunscreen liberally. How long do you think a 2.9 ounce tube would last at a "liberal" rate?

Not to mention the plastic. I was willing to buy new plastic in order to replace my toxic sunscreens with a less toxic version. But how much plastic will I have to go through buying such small quantities at a time? NONE of the brands at Whole Foods were sold in any larger size than 4 ounces. And all of them cost at least $10 each.

So I thought, I'm just not rich enough to spring for the super premium natural brands. I'll head over to Walgreen's drugstore and check out the few common brands that EWG recommends. Well, at first I couldn't find any on the shelves at all, among the Coppertones and Bullfrogs and Banana Boats. I did finally find the Neutrogena Sensitive Skin sunscreen, but also that it was full of parabens, preservatives that we are also warned to stay away from. And it wasn't any less expensive than the natural stuff.

So I am currently sunscreen-free and in a quandary. What should I do?

What sunscreen do you use, if any? Do you worry about questionable ingredients or do you just go for the cheapest and figure the chemicals are less of a worry than the UV radiation? Do you buy the expensive ones?

Or do you just avoid the sun altogether? Wear a hat and long sleeves? Carry a parasol?

What's the solution? Cuz I have no idea at this point. And part of me feels like I've been so lax about sunscreen up until now, I'm probably screwed anyway. Is that a bad attitude?
 

 

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Year 2, Week 11 Results: 1.0 oz of plastic waste.

Arya can has plastic? Well, after cooping you up in a cage for so long, I wish I could give you anything you want. But no, little kitty, u cant has plastic. Give it back pleeze.

Okay, here's this week's tally. Plastic items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 prescription bottle and cap. Finally used up. And as I've mentioned before, Rx bottles cannot be refilled in the state of California. Even the vet won't reuse them.

And the new plastic waste:

• 1 prescription bottle and cap -- Arya's. Kitty morphine. Fun while it lasted.


• Plastic tape from a package received this week. More on this tomorrow when I write about something I found to make drinking fun again. Soda, that is. Or iced tea. Okay, mai tais. Whatever. Are you curious?

It's Labor Day, and I'm resting from labor. Bye.


 

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Year 2, Week 10 Results: 19.6 oz of plastic waste!

What does it mean when your cat's poop suddenly turns red? Could be some terrible disease. Or could just mean your cat's been eating her red blanket and explains why she's not hungry anymore. I've been so worried about poor little albatross chicks consuming pieces of plastic out in the North Pacific Gyre, while here at home under my own nose my kitty's been chowing down on polar fleece. Look at all the holes!

This is the blanket the kittens came with. I put it in Arya's cage while she was healing, thinking it would be familiar and comforting. And I guess it was. Comfort food. (Plastic blanket, and god knows what kind of dye it's got in it.)

Little Hobble had her sutures out on Friday and is getting back to her normal spirited self, which is a little worrisome because her bones will take a while to completely heal. So we still have to keep her in the cage -- sans fake plastic blanket!

So, here's this week's tally. Plastic items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 85 oz bottle Sun Light gel dishwasher detergent and cap. The main reason this stuff has lasted so long is that we bought it when we first moved into this apartment three years ago and then rarely used the dishwasher. Only recently did I figure out that washing one load of dishes per week in the dishwasher is actually more efficient for us than handwashing. So, we've finally used up this bottle and have now switched to powdered detergent in a cardboard box.
  
  At the moment, we are trying Ecover Automatic Dishwasher Powder because it's non-toxic and also because it seems to have the most environmentally-friendly packaging. The box is made from recycled cardboard AND the spout is also cardboard rather than metal, like those of Seventh Generation and Whole Foods brands. Fewer types of materials means better recycling, right? The Ecover web site mentions a polypropylene cover, but I'm wondering if that is referring to some other product because our box of detergent has no plastic cover.
  
  Ecover has a statement about trace amounts of dioxane found in its products, but it seems to only apply to the liquid dish soap, not the powder. It remains to be seen how effective this stuff is. Do you guys use dishwasher detergent and if so, what works best for you? Oh, and does anyone have tips for the best way to load the dishwasher? Neither Michael nor I grew up with one, so we're doing the best we can.
  
  And yes, I'm sure we could be super efficient at handwashing and skip the machine. But the fact remains that we are not. Let's just leave it at that. :-)

And the new plastic waste:

• 1 chewed up red polar fleece blanket. Already fully described above.


• 1 plastic seal from around the neck of a jar of Fudge Is My Life fudge sauce. It's almost gone. I heard back from one person who won a jar a few weeks ago and mailed it off on Friday. Haven't heard back from the other two: Small Change and Bobbi. If you want your fudge, email me at beth [at] fakeplasticfish [dot] come before it's gone!

Only 4 items this week. Not bad!

Tomorrow, I'll report all about the ridiculous search for plastic-free water at the the Outside Lands Music Festival on Friday, and the Radiohead show that pummeled me with its exquisite noise and left me breathless with hope for humanity. (What a world where guys can make sounds that take over my whole body and soul and cause me to weep with amazement no matter how many times I hear them.)
 

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Year 2, Week 9 Results: 2.5 oz of plastic waste.

Soots has taken over many of Arya's old duties while she is out of commission, the thorough examination of my weekly plastic waste being one of them. As I write this, Arya is lying on the floor at my feet, wishing I'd take the elegant collar off her neck and let her pull out her sutures. Friday, little kitty, Friday they come out. Then, you can lick your wounds all you want. For those who miss her, I've got video of Miss Hobble Bobble, as she's come to be known, below. But first, the tally!

Plastic items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• Plastic wrap from the final Wholphin DVD. I subscribed to these DVDs over a year ago before starting this project, and if the notice on the envelope was correct, this will be my final one.

New plastic purchased since the plastic project began and used this week:

• 1 big ass bag (34 lbs) of World's Best Cat Litter. I sent an email to GPC Pet Products in July asking them to reconsider their packaging. Here's the email reply I got in response:
  

  From: "Kissell, Luke" (luke.kissell@grainprocessing.com)
  To: Beth Terry
  Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2008 16:49:31 -0500
  Subject: RE: Contact Us: Product Performance
  
  Dear Beth,
  
  Thank you for taking the time to contact us here at GPC Pet Products Maker's Of World's Best Cat Litter(tm).
  
  We appreciate the comments you have shared with us regarding our packaging. As we look into the future, we will be looking at a new type of package. It is always nice to hear what our consumers have to say about what their likes and dislikes are about our package. This type of information helps us become more aware of what our consumers are looking for in terms of packaging. We take these comments very seriously.
  
  I will forward your comments onto the appropriate personnel for review.
  
  Again, thank you for your comments.
  
  Have a good day,
  
  Luke Kissell
  Customer Service Coordinator
  GPC Pet Products
  Makers of Worlds Best Cat Litter(tm)
  TF:877-367-9225 Ext 4790
  Ph:563-264-4790
  Fax:563-264-4788

  
  I know there were several other people who thought they might also send letters to this company. Did you get the same response? I wonder if they'll actually change the packaging.


• Plastic from the ends of a bunch of organic bananas.


• 1 plastic Rx bottle and lid. Hobble had to have antiobiotics 2x per day through a syringe for a week. I haven't included the syringe in the tally as I'm keeping it for the next time one of them needs to use it. That way I won't have to take a new syringe home from the vet.


• 2 red plastic drinking straws. Oops. My sister and her husband were in town visiting us last week, and wow did we ever eat. Restaurant after restaurant. I almost got away plastic-free until I ordered an iced tea during lunch on Friday and was having so much fun I forgot to request "no straw." Remind me to tell you about the compostable straws I learned about yesterday.

So, one more week of plastic tallied up and put away.

And here's the promised video: Miss Hobble Bobble's Adventure.



If for some reason, you can't view the embedded video, try this link to view it on Google Video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1193517387124029086&hl=en
 

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Year 2, Week 7 & 8 Results: .9 oz of plastic waste.

The last week was all about cats and fudge sauce. Kitty was hurt and mama was stressed. And mama still had half a case of fudge sauce calling out to calm her nerves. All she needed was a big spoon.

So, if you'll recall, I did attempt to get rid of some of the fudge sauce by bribing the Californians to write to your reps about the AB2058 plastic bag legislation. Three CA readers heeded the call: Arudous, HomeSchoolMom, and Green Bean. But Arduous and Green Bean already received jars of fudge sauce. And a couple of people who don't have the privilege of living in California, Small Change and Bobbi, wrote letters to their local officials anyway. So, I'd love to send jars of fudge sauce to HomeSchoolMom, Small Change, and Bobbi. If you all want this treat, please email me directly at beth [at] fakeplasticfish [dot] com and let me know your mailing address.

With that, here's the tally for the past two weeks. Plastic items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 broken plastic frog found in a cactus pot. When I first started container gardening, I thought it was fun to buy little plastic animals to live with my cacti and other plants. Wasn't thinking about any of the ramifications of plastic back then, and didn't even realize that the plastic would photodegrade over time. It does. It gets brittle in the sun, breaks down, and ends up crumbling into the soil. But it doesn't biodegrade. So we just add tiny pieces of plastic to our potting soil or ground. As the kitties say, "Not so great, ackshully."

And the new plastic waste:

• 1 outer wrapper from a case of Instinct canned cat food.


• 3 plastic tag hangers. Unfortunately, I don't remember what they came from. I don't remember buying anything new last week or the week before, but I must have to have ended up with some tag hangers. Sigh.


• 3 plastic seals from around necks of 3 jars of Fudge Is My Life fudge sauce. See comments above.


• 1 piece of plastic packing tape from box of My Water flavor essence. My Water flavor essence is sold by Soda Club to flavor homemade soda water. These two bottles were sent for me to sample. Flavor essence is made from the peels of fruits and contains no sugar or any other ingredient. And really, it doesn't actually add flavor (since the tongue can only detect sweet, sour, salty, and bitter) but rather aroma for your nose. It's for people who want just a tiny touch of fruit without sweetness. It comes in glass bottles with small plastic caps and is shipped nearly plastic-free except for a bit of tape on outside of the box. (Perhaps this is a good example for the fudge sauce lady. If these glass bottles don't break with nearly zero packaging, perhaps the fudge sauce jars wouldn't either?)

That's all the plastic for the last two weeks. There has been some generated by Arya's traumas and vet visits, but it won't be tallied until it's used up.

 

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Year 2, Week 6 Results: .2 oz of plastic waste.

I took my mini plastic stash (.2 ounces! Yes!) outside today to hang out with my...

MASSIVE TOMATO PLANTS!

Okay, okay, don't laugh. You guys told me I was an idiot to think I could grow 4 tomato plants using one cage, so I bought 3 more. The plants may not be humongous yet, and certainly not like Allie's plants that are reportedly taller than she. (Of course, I've never seen what Allie looks like. Maybe she's really, really short.) But don't forget, I got them in the ground weeks and weeks after Jennconspiracy gave them to me, so I'm confident I'll be up to my eyeballs in tomatoes by this fall. And learning to can them. Thanks for all your great advice.

Okay, here's last week's tally. It's all new plastic waste:

• 2 plastic tags and 2 plastic tag hangers from tomato cages. One of the three new cages was missing its tag, so I only ended up with two.


• Plastic cap loop and foam cap insert from a bottle of fresh maple syrup. Michael's sister visited us last week and brought a big bottle of dark maple syrup fresh from her neighbor's trees in Western Massachusetts. Mmmmmmmmmm! The bottle was plastic, but we decanted the syrup into a glass jar, and she took the plastic bottle back home with her in hopes that her neighbor would be able to reuse it. We'll find out.


• Address label from the card that came with my Fudge Is My Life fudge sauce. Somehow I missed including this in the week that all that fudge sauce arrived.


• 1 plastic seal from around the neck of a jar of Fudge Is My Life fudge sauce. So far, I've given away two jars and opened one for myself. Trying to limit my consumption to one moderate spoonful per day. We'll see how that goes!


• Plastic from the ends of a bunch of organic bananas.

Gotta get going to feed and pet Soots and Arya's brother Robb and step brother Ginger. Our friends are out of town, so we have new kitties to play with and torture. (Just kidding, Laura!)
 

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Year 2, Week 5 Results: 1.4 oz of plastic waste.

This post will be short because I want to get in a review of the Blogher Conference before retiring to the woods for my vision fast. So, here's the tally:

Plastic items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 Ziploc bag. I've been using this bag for over a year, and finally it has a big hole in it and needs to retire. I've been using it to store bread, so far not having found a plastic-free way to keep bread fresh. I buy local bread that comes in a paper bag (like Acme Bread or Grace Baking Co) and then put the paper-wrapped bread into the Ziploc bag. Note to self: Ziploc bags and kitchen knives do not get along well together in the sink.

And the new plastic waste:

• 1 outer wrapper from a case of Instinct canned cat food.


• Tag hanger from a new broom. The rest of the broom is entirely plastic free. Check out the way I carried it home. Remind you of anyone?

• 1 Refresh Endura single use eye drop container.


• Blogher Conference name tag. Another piece of plastic that could have been avoided. I had planned to attend today's Sunday session of the conference, at which I would have returned the name badge holder to be used again. Instead, I was too tired and stayed home today, so I have no way to return it. Ah well.

More on the conference in the next post.
 

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Year 2, Week 4 Results: 3.1 oz of plastic waste.

Move along. Move along. Nothing to see here, folks. That means you, little black kitty cat. Move!

Arya has been in such big trouble this week, causing her human mom (Beth) to yell and yell and her human dad (Michael) to cover his ears and then frantically rearrange the house to give Arya fewer things to mess with, thereby causing less yelling from Beth.

And Axelle, I don't want to hear about "Mr. Sprayer" anymore. We have "Ms. Squirter," and she does nothing to deter Arya from scratch scratch scratching on the locked bedroom door because as soon as Arya (with her super sharp kitten ears) hears mom get out of bed, she dashes under the living room sofa and hides to avoid squirtation. Mom opens the door, and no one's there. Once mom chased Arya around the living room at 3am just so she could squirt her little black butt (I just realized how bizarre that could sound out of context), but then Mom felt really, really bad about doing something so confusing to a furry little brain-damaged beast.

Soots, on the other hand, who is never in these pictures because he knows better than to tangle with Beth's stuff, is now officially Mom's favorite, even though he bites her chin every morning to wake her up.

It was a slow plastic week, so I thought I'd just fill space with kitty news. Okay, here's the tally:

Plastic items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 plastic spice container & lid. Reused for a while, but now it's just gross and needs to be retired to plastic purgatory.


• 1 Method hand soap container & pump. We were reusing this one for a while, too. (Haven't used liquid soap in nearly a year since switching to bar soap.) But that's another one of the problems with plastic: it can't really be cleaned properly. Plastic attracts oil. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to clean grease off of it? So this container is now ready for retirement as well. Ah glass. Just love how squeaky clean it can be. Plastic will never squeak. Remember that.

And the new plastic waste:

• 1 outer wrapper from a case of Instinct canned cat food.


• Piece of plastic from ends of a bunch of fair trade organic bananas.


• 1 bandaid. See? This is boring, huh?


• 5 Refresh Endura single use eye drop containers. My eyes were doing so well (considering the chronic cornea problem I've got) but this week, they really flared up. I'm guessing they are aggravated by the smoke that's invaded the Bay Area from forest fires burning around us in Northern and Central California. We're all dry and sooty in these parts. Wanna come visit? Bring some rain!

I'll have a funny Styrofoam story for you tomorrow.
 

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Year 2, Week 3 Results: 4.5 oz of plastic waste.

Yikes! This photo reminds me of one of the plastic tallies from Fake Plastic Fish, The Early Days. So, in the interest of brevity and my own sanity, I'm going to group some items so the list doesn't seem so long.

Plastic items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 2 AC Transit bus passes, finally used up. These are not the only plastic transit passes I've gone through. Oh no. BART tickets are made of plastic, and I use those all the time. It's just that BART tickets get sucked back into the machine and the end of their lives, whereas AC Transit passes stay with you forever. (I've learned more about those plastic BART tickets, by the way, and writing about them is on my FPF To Do List.)


• 1 random piece of plastic found while cleaning. It broke off of something. We have no idea what.

New plastic purchased since the plastic project began and used this week:

• 1 big ass bag (34 lbs) of World's Best Cat Litter. I've already discussed the various litters I've tried. Haven't had time to try making my own. But I did finally (today) send a letter to GPC Pet Products, the company that makes World's Best Cat Litter. Will publish it in a separate post later this week.


• 3 plastic labels from jars of King's Cupboard dessert sauces. These are the free sauces I wrote about 2 weeks ago. I didn't realize at the time that the labels were plastic. And I doubt I would have refused free fudge and caramel sauce if I had known. And I have to say that Friday, the espresso fudge sauce really came in handy after I gave up coffee and alcohol. I ate the whole jar in one day!
  
  I meant for it to be the last chocolate for a while. Another one of the crutches I use to avoid emotions. But today, I received a HUGE box in the mail from the Fudge Is My Life company. Take a wild guess who sent that to me. Someone getting me back for all the chocolate bars I sent him! More on that, and the packaging involved, later. For now, let me just pledge not to open any of these jars until next month.


• Plastic from new bike purchase: 4 plastic straps from my lock and basket, 1 plastic wrapper and 1 foam insert from the cell phone case that came with the bike. I was surprised that there was not more plastic packaging involved, but maybe the bike shop discarded it before selling the bike? And yes, there is plastic on the bike itself, although not much. And of course my helmet is made from plastic. But for the sake of my skull, I think I can live with it.


• Plastic baggie from a set of Red Cross refrigerator magnets. My Red Cross card came in the mail this weekend, along with some refrigerator "reminder" magnets. I don't need them, but they are the least of my worries where the Red Cross is concerned.


• Plastic from new Penguin soda maker: 2 plastic shipping labels, 1 plastic box handle, 1 plastic CO2 cartridge wrapper. I was surprised this week with the gift of a Penguin soda maker. An employee from Soda Club, the company that distributes these machines, read about the Take Back The Filter campaign and then my post on Fake Plastic Fish about the Penguin, and decided she wanted to send me one. And I've got to say that having fizzy water this weekend has been very, very helpful when I wanted to imbibe other, less benign things. I plan to write a whole lot more about this machine in a future post, so stay tuned.


• 1 plastic strip from around a can of frozen juice. I use a small spoonful of frozen, unsweetened juice to flavor my fizzy water instead of sugary syrups or other flavorings.


• A few pieces of scotch tape from some thrift store plates. The plates were held together as a group with the tape.


• 1 piece of plastic from a bunch of organic bananas.


• 1 plastic insert from my glass bottle of household cleaner, aka vodka. It's gone. I'm switching back to vinegar, even though I don't care for the smell, because vodka is just too dangerous to have in the house right now.

That's it! It was a busy, busy week.

Thank you to everyone who left such supportive comments in response to my last post. I was a little worried at first about writing it. It didn't, after all, relate directly to plastic or environmental issues, and I wondered if I was turning Fake Plastic Fish into too much of a personal journal. But then I remembered what Robj98168 wrote in response to my post, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger. "I just blog on what interests me and damn those who don't find me interesting!" Okay, maybe I wouldn't put it that bluntly, but he inspired me to open up, and so for that, thanks Rob!
 

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Year 2, Week 2 Results: 1.8 oz of plastic waste.

It was an interesting week. Attended a funeral. Ate a whole lot of chocolate. Bought a bike. And began a Vision Quest. Went through a bit of plastic, too. So here's the tally.

Plastic items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 Sicilia lemon juice bottle and cap. It took over a year for us to finish this, and we've got another one (expired) in the cupboard. We mostly use fresh limes and lemons now. I guess we should use up the bottled stuff before it gets moldy, if it hasn't already.


• 1 Sicilia lime juice bottle and cap. Same as above. And we've got another one of these in the cupboard too.

New plastic purchased since the plastic project began and used this week:

• 1 prescription bottle and cap. As I've mentioned before, these bottles cannot be refilled in California. It's against the law. Even our vet won't reuse them.


• 1 bit of plastic from a bunch of organic bananas. No, I haven't found any other brand of organic bananas in my area without the plastic, as another commenter suggested the last time.


• 1 fork from the after funeral luncheon. An amazing man died this month. He was one of the founders of the company I work for and the father of the current owner and her sister. He survived prostate cancer for over 15 years and rode his recumbent bike all the way down the West Coast of the United States. In his latter years, he became a vegan for health reasons but still liked to sneak the ocassional cigarette. He enjoyed hanging out in the accounting office with my co-worker and me, and we will miss his energy and humor. So yeah, I ended up with a plastic fork that day (and a plastic cup which I washed and replaced in the kitchen) but honestly I had other things on my mind.


• Plastic return envelope from Cell Phones For Soldiers which came with a book I express ordered from Amazon.com. Okay, where to start with this one? I don't normally order from Amazon.com, but I needed a book right away for a group I joined this month and couldn't wait to find it used. The group is run by Jonathan Gustin, the founder of Green Sangha, and as a member, I'll be partaking in a Vision Quest retreat later this month. Please don't ask me what a vision quest is. I'm still finding out. Suffice it to say, (or suffice to day, as some believe the saying goes) I didn't expect a plastic Cell Phones for Soldiers envelope and I just can't even start to analyze my ambivalence about that.

So there's the plastic waste I ended up with last week. But there was more plastic waste that I had a hand in generating. While my parents were in town a few weeks ago, they discovered a chocolate bar that they absolutely fell in love with. Divine Milk Chocolate. They loved the sweet, creamy taste. And while I much prefer dark chocolate, I loved that the bar is organic and fair trade. So for Father's Day, I ordered 20 bars to be shipped to Maryland.

Did I think about what it would entail to ship 20 bars to Maryland during a heat wave? Kind of. I did request no extra plastic packaging materials in my order. Alas, the message was not relayed. The chocolate arrived at their house in pristine condition, "And look what came with your delightful gift," my dad writes in his thank you email, "(the choc is in the small plastic bubble-wrapped box in front of the STYROFOAM cooler) plus a dry ice plastic bag, plus 4 plastic bags containing gel plus - YAY - a slew of paper packing --"





Look how cute my mom is.

"Are you going to count this on your web site for next month's tally?" my dad asks.

Well, no. It goes in your tally, Dad. But I did report it, just to keep us all honest. Please reuse the ice chest for your next picnic.

I'll have more plastic to report next week related to the bicycle I bought this Sunday, and a full report on the bike with photos tomorrow.
 

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Year 2, Week 1 Results: 4.1 oz of plastic waste.

Back to dealing with plastic. I wonder if it'll be another whole year before I have a second plastic-free week.

Plastic items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 plastic wrapper from a Wholphin DVD. I subscribed to Wholphin before starting this project. I believe I've received my last DVD, and I won't be renewing. The really stupid thing is that I haven't watched any of them since I subscribed. I used to buy a lot of things that I didn't end up watching or using. My friend Axelle is currently borrowing these DVDs. Hope she's enjoying them.


• 1 Ikea fluorescent light bulb. The weight of this week's tally includes both the plastic and the glass because I can't weigh them separately. Instead of saving this light bulb in plastic purgatory, I'll be getting the mercury out of the house as soon as possible and dropping it off at Cole Hardware on 4th Street in SF. Yes, I realize Ikea will also take them back. But Cole Hardware is easier for me to get to via BART.


• 2 Bandaids. Or as they call them in the U.K., plasters. This will teach me not to to let the kitties' nails get too long! Had to cover up some nasty scratches on my foot.

New plastic purchased since the plastic project began and used this week:

• Plastic bag of Instinct dry cat food. Mostly Soots and Arya get wet food from cans, as I've previously mentioned. But we do give them a little dry here and there so their teeth will have something to crunch.


• Plastic pizza box top holder upper thingie. I found this under the refrigerator! I think it arrived in a pizza a few months ago before we started remembering to request pizzas without the little plastic thingie in the middle. Nowadays, we always ask, and our pizzas never stick to the top.


• 1 Refresh Endura single use eyedrop container. My eyes have been doing pretty well without drops until this last week.


• Plastic shipping label cover from a package sent from Canada. Don't know if this type of plastic is required to ship from Canada. Anyone else know?


• 1 plastic tag hanger from a To-go Ware tiffin I bought from the Ecology Center. I'm thinking this little container will be much safer for bringing home hot leftovers than the plastic Tupperware to-go container I had been using.


• Plastic seal from around the neck of another jar of Fudge Is My Life fudge sauce. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Fudge Is My Life is the best fudge sauce I have ever tasted. Axelle and I had a little taste test this weekend, comparing it to some sauces from The King's Cupboard, which we got for free at Whole Foods. (Why? Because the guy in the chocolate sauce department liked us!) The TKC sauces were good. But FIML won hands down.

Okay, gonna be more careful this week. After all, I have enough dessert toppings to last for a while. What else could I possibly need?
 

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Week 52 Results: 0 oz of plastic waste. Happy Blogiversary, FPF!

This Week:

A Year Ago:


What a year it's been. I've given Fake Plastic Fish a little makeover, and I've uploaded the year's worth of plastic tally photos to Flickr, where they can be viewed all together or individually with links to the original blog posts.

I've learned a lot, but I'm not done yet. Sure, I was careful not to accumulate plastic waste last week, but there will be more this week and in the weeks to come. Even after a year, we still have some products in plastic containers from before I started this project, and those will enter my plastic purgatory at some point. And there are plastic dilemmas I still haven't solved: mainly in the cat food/cat litter arena.

I may take a mini blogging break this week to focus on Take Back The Filter work, getting through my email finally, and basically being a nice person for my Michael, Soots, & Arya to live with. (Yes, we finally made that chore chart last night.) Or I might not. Regardless, I have a lot more to say and even more to learn, so I'll be back!

Don't use plastic while I'm gone.

Beth
 

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Week 51 Results: 4.4 oz of plastic waste

Wow. I actually got my butt outside yesterday and did some heavy non-computer related labor. Finally planted the tomato seedlings that Jennconspiracy brought me weeks ago. Hope they will live. I've been so tied to my desk chair that I let most of my outdoor potted plants in the roof garden sizzle and dry up. I rationalized my laziness as water conservation, which it actually was! We are officially in a drought here, and I can't justify ornamental plants in pots on the hot roof. Also, we now have access to some ground in the front yard, so I can actually plant something useful like veggies.

I had about 20 little funerals (in my own mind) yesterday as I lugged each heavy terra cotta pot with its dead flower arrangement down to the front yard, dumped it out, hacked up the solidified potting soil with a trowel in order to reuse it, and deposited the dried up corpses into the green compost bin. I envisioned what each plant had looked like at its peak and felt a little sad. But then I looked around at all the flowering plants in my neighborhood and realized that if I just get out more, I have a huge garden to enjoy just by walking down the street!

Included in this week's tally are some plastic items I came across while dismantling the roof garden and mantling (?) the new front yard garden, which at this point consists of 4 tomatoes plants and a whole bunch of dirt and compost. Oh yeah, more on the compost in tomorrow's post.

Plastic items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 plastic bag of Black Gold organic potting mix. Still had about 1/4 of a bag left, so dumped it out into the front yard.


• 8 plastic plant identification tags from deceased plants. I kept any tags that were blank on one side to reuse. These in the tally have printing on both sides.


• 1 plastic case from a set of chopsticks. Found in the silverware drawer while putting dishes away.


• 1 totally scrungy, funkified yellow/green sponge. I think I've eaked out every bit of life from this thing, and it's time to let go. I have a few more funky synthetic sponges I'm using up before switching to the Twist natural cellulose/loofah versions I bought at Whole Foods. (Don't like dish rags, so please don't try to convince me.)


• Flexcar membership card. Flexcar was bought out by Zip Car and the card replaced with a brand new plastic Zipcard.


• Tiny piece of scotch tape from something I can't recall.


• Little green plastic frog from one of my plant pots, half of which is now charred black. When I first started container gardening, back in the day, I thought it was cute to put little plastic critters in the pots. How this thing got charred is a mystery. Could the sun do that to plastic? Crazy. Another roof garden casualty.


• A wad of electrical tape I pulled off some electronics this week while trying to figure out why the TV sound wouldn't come on. A big waste.

New plastic purchased since the plastic project began and used this week:

• Plastic outer wrapper from a 24-pack of Instinct canned cat food. No decisions in the pet food arena yet.


• Outer seal from a 1/2 pint of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. The second one from the parental visit.


• 1 bit of plastic from a bunch of organic fair trade bananas.

One more week to go before the 1-year anniversary of Fake Plastic Fish!

My goal this week: 0 plastic waste. In this entire year, I have yet to complete a week completely plastic-free. But I'm determined that week 52 will be that week. To that end, I'll be taking precautions. I've already tallied the cat food wrapper, and we won't go through another whole case in a week. No one is to buy take out food for me. In fact, I won't visit any restaurants that I haven't already personally certified as safe from plastic. Maybe I'll just avoid restaurants altogether. Also, no bananas this week, since I only buy the organic variety that come with plastic around the stems. I will not order anything through the mail. And I'll put a sincere request out to friends and family: please, please, please no plastic this week!

I have an idea in mind for my Week 52 photo, but it will only work if there is no plastic.
 

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Week 50 Results: 1.1 oz of plastic waste

Finally, the tally for week ending May 31. At this point, Fake Plastic Fish is 1-1/2 weeks away from its 1-year anniversary! What will happen in year 2? That's what I've been contemplating for the last few days, in between eating out with my parents, watching movies, taking walks, enjoying just being. Here's the tally. I do have a lot more to write about, but I also have work to catch up on for my employer today, so this will be short and sweet.

The tally this week includes all new stuff:

• Plastic outer wrapper from a 24-pack of Instinct canned cat food. No decisions in the pet food arena yet.


• Outer seal from a 1/2 pint of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. This is what I do with my parents when we get together: eat ice cream! Hurray! It was late at night when they arrived in the Bay Area, and all the natural grocery stores were closed, so we shopped at Safeway, and B&J was the best I could do. There will be another of these plastic seals next week.


• 1 plastic seal from a jar of Fudge Is My Life hot fudge sauce. I did forego the High Fructose Corn Syrup-laden jars of Hershey's and Smuckers and held out for my fave local fudge sauce the next day. This stuff rocks!


• 1 plastic cork from a bottle of Pepperwood Grove pinot noir. Michael won this bottle at a triva contest! He's such a smart guy.


• 1 plastic salad dressing container from Razan's Organic Kitchen in Berkeley. I'm always surprised when I go out to dinner what disposable plastic I'll end up with unexpectedly.


• 1 plastic tag from a Cascade Green tomato cage. Jenn! We bought the tomato cage, but we still haven't planted the tomatoes you brought over! I water them every other day to keep them alive. I swear we will plant them this weekend. But the hard part is transferring the compost from that god-awful Compost Tumbler on the roof down to the front yard and mixing it up with the dirt down there before planting.

That's it. Rosa asked if my lifestyle changes when my parents visit. It does, a bit. I eat more ice cream than usual. I eat out in restaurants more than usual; however, I was diligent about bringing my containers with me for leftovers, and we never went the fast food route. I drive more than usual (they rented a car), but driving is necessary because it's difficult for my mom to walk very far, especially when the whether is chilly.

I fully enjoyed their visit, and it was nice to take a little blogging break.
 

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Week 49 Results: 1.75 oz of plastic waste

First, last week's tally, and then a follow-up report on a letter I sent couple of weeks ago. Items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• Plastic wrapper from a package of Memorex DVD+Rs. I've had these sitting around for over a year and finally broke them open this week to save Mark's and my Amazing Race application video.


• Plastic blister pack of mini DV cartridges. Intended to record our Amazing Race application video on these, which had also been sitting in a drawer for several years. Unfortunately, the video camera turned out to be broken and we had to scramble to find another one before the deadline, one which didn't even use mini DVs. Ah well. The waste still exists.


• 1 wrapper from aforementioned unused mini DV cartridge. Gonna have to find a place to fix my video camera, which I haven't used since January of 2005!


• Hard molded black plastic from package of AA batteries from Costco. Bought over a year ago. Still using them up and will certainly be switching to all rechargables when they are gone.


• 2 plastic wrappers from some electronics cables found in a drawer while searching for the mini DVs. Plastic is still hiding everywhere in our house.


• Broken plastic scissors handle. Broke this last Sunday while working on my BRITA costume for the Bay to Breakers. The weight included in the tally is only the plastic. We're keeping the blades to use for scraping.


• Tiny plastic wrapper from a AAA battery.


• A bunch of plastic fishing line.
Used to attached garbage to Christa's Bay to Breakers landfill costume last Sunday. We had it, so we used it.

New plastic waste purchased since the plastic project began:

• Plastic wrapper from my Bay to Breakers timing chip. Which I ended up not even using.


• 1 piece of plastic from a bunch of organic bananas.


• Plastic outer wrapper from the Blue Vinyl DVD I wrote about here. And yes, the case and DVD itself are also plastic, but I hope to keep and use them for a long time.

That's it for last week.

I also wanted to show you this beautiful card and note I received back from Santa Sabina Retreat Center in response to the letter I sent them on May 7 regarding their use of Synthetic air fresheners and antibacterial hand soap. The note reads:

Spring 2008

Dear Beth,

With thanks for your gentle reminder re: hand soaps, air fresheners. We have changed to natural soaps and Ecco-mist [and something about green awareness that I can't make out.]

Harriet Hope and Susannah

What a nice reminder to me that "gentle reminders" are often the best way to approach people before stronger measures are taken.
 

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Week 48 Results: 5.9 oz of plastic waste

Sunny is the winner of last week's contest to answer the question of why organic bananas come with a little piece of plastic around the stems but non-organic bananas do not. She wrote:

Beth, from this website (http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Plasticizers/Out-Of-Diet-PG5nov03.htm) I think it's to prevent mold.

"Organic bananas now come from wholesalers with a sticky plastic wrapping the cut stem to protect the bananas from a black mold.[5] The mold is controlled on non-organic bananas by dipping the cut ends in a fungicide."

I wanted to check out this answer for myself before awarding the prize, so I sent an email to Dole's customer service asking the question, and they responded thus:

From: ConsumerServices@DoleConsumerCenter.com
To: Beth Terry
Subject: Dole Contact Us Response, Reference #001147431A
Date: Thu, 15 May 2008 17:57:49 -0400

Dear Ms. Terry,

Thank you for contacting us. The plastic cover seals the surface of the cut-crown on the top of the cluster to protect the quality and the health of the crown. The air-tight parafilm seal helps maintain the products freshness and quality appeal.

We appreciate your interest in Dole Food Company. We're glad to provide the information you requested and hope it is useful.

It's been a pleasure to help you.

Sincerely,

Dole Consumer Response Staff
001147431A / DCR/cl

From Dole's answer and from Sunny's research, it sounds like the plastic is used on organic bananas because they can't be dipped into the usual chemicals that regular bananas are dipped in. Michael says he once heard, in fact, that you shouldn't peel a non-organic banana and then touch the inside fruit with your hands because the pesticides will rub off onto the fruit you are going to eat. Scary, huh?

So Sunny, please e-mail me your mailing address and let me know which prize you want, Sierra Club's Hey Mr. Green or the Ridley plastic bag carrier.

All right, here's last week's tally. It's a big one! Items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 2 strips of tape pulled off boxes we used to make signs for the Bay to Breakers yesterday. Yep. It happened! I got two very enthusiastic volunteers, Tanya and Christa, to march with me in the Bay to Breakers, so I did have to walk across SF dressed as a BRITA filter after all. Tanya and Christa made their own costumes and we all carried signs and handed out flyers. It was an awesome day, and I'll post pictures as soon as I get them from Christa's camera.


• A huge hunk of duct tape from costume-making session. We already had this tape, so I figured I'd use it. Turns out duct tape isn't good for everything, as some people like to think. It pulled up off the cardboard, and I ended up replacing it with brown paper tape, which worked just fine. Wish I'd known that ahead of time and not wasted all this crazy duct tape, which I guess should be saved for, um, ducts.

New plastic waste purchased and generated last week:

• 2 plastic tubs (#5 plastic) and two lids (#4 plastic) from Indian take-out. Michael asked before picking up this food if they could serve it in cardboard boxes rather than plastic. They assured him they would. Imagine his surprise when he picked up these two plastic containers. "Oh, we didn't know you meant everything." My lesson: Give up the freakin' take-out. The convenience is not worth the waste anyway, plastic or otherwise.


• 1 piece of plastic from another bunch of organic bananas. See above.


• Plastic bag from a gift of Scharffen Berger truffles from friends. I think our friends actually received these chocolates from another friend and then passed some on to us. Still, we are the final recipients of the plastic bag, so it goes into my tally.


• 2 straws from a cup of coffee from The Mint. We went to The Mint Karaoke Lounge after the Bay to Breakers to hang out and celebrate. Who would have thought they'd put bar straws into plain old coffee?


• 1 plastic wrap from a 24-pack of Instinct canned cat food. I have been researching homemade cat food, but I came to a road block this past week. A vet referred me to the nutrition clinic at the U.C. Davis Veterinary Medicine Teaching Hopital. They specialize in homemade diets for animals. But the nutritionist I spoke with said they will not recommend a homemade diet for animals under one year old because it's hard to meet all their nutritional needs when they are that young. She recommended I stick with the commercial cat food for another few months and then call them again.
  
  So what do you think? We're feeding them cat food from all these cans every day, cans which are lined with BPA and which must be recycled. We can't feed them dry food because every time we try they get diarrhea, no matter what brand. (And believe me, we have tried many many brands, including Pet Promise, Wellness, Instinct, Nutro, Hills, and others.) I'd like to make their food, but the nutritionist has me worried that I might not give them everything they need. I'm at a stand-still at this point.

That's it for last week. Can't wait to show you the pictures from yesterday and break some more exciting news from the Take Back The Filter campaign!

P.S. Michael broke his last year's Bay to Breakers record with a time of 55:29! He placed 582 out of 22,439 finishers! I was not one of those finishers, as our little group made a detour at around Mile 6 and headed for the costume contest and Polish sausages. We all have different priorities, right?
 

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Week 47 Results: .05 oz of plastic waste and A CONTEST

So the million dollar question is: Why do organic bananas come with a little bit of plastic around the stems when regular bananas do not? Inquiring minds want to know. There's plenty of speculation, but I haven't heard the definitive answer from an expert. So here's the contest: Since I don't actually have a million dollars to spend, I'll give away your choice of Sierra Club's Hey Mr. Green, which I reviewed last week, or the Ridley plastic bag carrier, also reviewed last week, to the first person who can find the answer to the banana question. It must be an answer from an actual expert. A produce clerk might be okay if they really seem like they know the answer and are not just speculating out of thin air. But I'd really like the answer to come from someone in the banana industry, and I just don't have the time to find out for myself. I'm sure the rest of FPF readers will thank you for your efforts. Oh, and Terrible Person, I think you are automatically disqualified because you live with me, so while I welcome your research skills, you can't win the prize.

All right, here's last week's tally. It's all new plastic.

• 2 pieces of plastic from a couple bunches of organic bananas


• 1 strip of tape from a package that was sent to me (But at this point I can't remember which package it was.)


• 1 plastic wrap from the opening of a Preserve toothbrush container


• 1 bandaid and 1 piece of medical tape from donating blood last Monday. There is soooo much plastic involved in giving blood, but this is the only type I brought home with me. In fact, I plan to write more about plastic tubing and medical bags later this week because some of the plastic issues are quite troublesome.

That's it for last week. I'm 5 weeks away from the 1-year anniversary of FPF! What should we do to celebrate? Let's start planning the party now!
 

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Week 46 Results: 3.0 (?) oz of plastic waste.

Wow. I almost, almost had a plastic-free week. Thursday, we had a special meeting at work, including Chinese food for lunch. I asked that mine please be delivered in a cardboard container instead of Styrofoam. Well, I guess the order-taker understood the "no Styrofoam" part but not the cardboard. While everyone else's lunch came in a Styrofoam container, mine was packed in a Polypropylene (#5 PP) clamshell. I didn't even know they made clamshells out of PP!

I couldn't bring the container home with me because I was leaving directly from work for my retreat, and there was still food inside, so I left it in the refrigerator. I'm sure the food's been eaten by now and the container tossed. What are ya gonna do?

So that's my tally for last week. (Like my artwork?)

Thanks to Michael once again for filling in. The retreat was perfect, in the perfectly imperfect way I wrote about a week ago. More on that in a future post. Most of all, I just want to express how profoundly grateful I am to all of you who read this blog and who are doing the best you can to take care of our world. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
 

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Week 45 Results: 4.9 oz of plastic waste.

Those kitties are still getting me in trouble, plastic-wise. And the trouble will continue a bit longer. You know how I said I was going to make it my mission to figure out homemade food for them within the next two weeks? Well, it ain't gonna happen this weekend because I'm leaving Thursday for my semi-annual meditation retreat (which I need oh so very much!) and won't be back again until Sunday evening. But it's gonna happen. I just feel guilty looking at all the cat food cans piling up in our recycling bin day after day, for a multitude of reasons. So, here's last week's tally:

Items purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 Kleenex pocket pack wrapper. I discovered this one in the bottom of my backpack. I don't think there are any more hiding in my house.


• 1 broken lid from a glass spice jar. Those kitties strike again! This time, the glass jar stayed intact, but the plastic lid broke. Go figure. I found another lid from those I've been collecting off the street that kinda sorta fits, so the jar is still usable.


• Wrapper from 2 Pepto Bismol tablets. Should have been unnecessary. Shouldn't have had that second (or was it third?) martini with my friend Mark Saturday night while we filled out applications for The Amazing Race. Oh yes we did! My life isn't just about plastic, ya know!

Now for the new items:

• 1 34-lb. bag of World's Best Cat Litter. Okay, here's the thing. SweatScoop comes in a paper bag and is made from wheat. Clearly, it's the ecological cat litter of choice. The trouble is, it sucks. It doesn't work. It sticks to the bottom of the cat box. It tracks all over the house. It doesn't smell great. And the clumps do not stay together at all. In short, I hated it.
  
  World's Best Cat Litter, on the other hand, comes in a plastic bag and is made from corn. Inferior ecologically-speaking. But it works soooo much better. It's flushable, clumps well, and is certainly a better alternative than clay litter. Okay, I know, I know. I did an interview with Allie of Allie's Answers on this here blog and told you about her recipe for homemade newsprint cat litter. I just have not had the time to make it and try it out myself. That's also on the eco-friendly cat agenda. But it has to get in line behind the food alternative, which I think is more important. This is environmental triage, isn't it?


• 2 plastic wrappers from two 24-can cases of Instinct cat food. Speaking of the cat food...


• 1 plastic seal from a re-usable ceramic jar of St. Benoit yogurt. We eat yogurt so infrequently that my last homemade batch went bad and I had to start over again. I wonder if it would work to save my starter in the freezer each time.


• 1 piece of plastic from a bunch of organic bananas.

That's it for last week.

I'm aiming for zero plastic this week. After all, I've collected none so far, and Thursday I leave for a retreat where there will be no plastic waste to collect. I just have to get through Wednesday and most of Thursday.
 

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Week 44 Results: .8 oz of plastic waste.

Another week. Earth Day is coming up in two days. Honestly, I've never paid it much attention. I didn't begin Fake Plastic Fish until June of last year. In the past, I've probably felt like Earth Day was a nice idea, but not much more. This year, Earth Day holds more significance for me. But I don't have anything special planned except to continue with what I'm already doing... blogging here, being mindful of my plastic and other waste, and continuing with the "Take Back The Filter" campaign. At the end of this post, I'll announce the winners of the children's book drawings. In the mean time, here's the weekly tally:

Items purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 plastic pen. I have switched to using Lamy fountain pens with converters that allow them to be refilled from a bottle of ink. I bought my pens at a local stationery shop here in Oakland and keep one at work and one here at home. But occasionally, when a fountain pen isn't handy, I reach for whatever pen is nearby, and I used up this disposable plastic pen this week. Looks like maybe I could refill it if I tried. I may test and see if I can get it open and fill it up using one of the syringes I got from the vet to give the cats medicine. But more than likely I'll just add it to my collection.


• 1 pair headphones. Sad. Sad. Sad. Someone chewed right through the cord. Now who do you suppose it could have been? I suspect one of these hoodlums:
  
  
  But I'm not naming names. Just hoping the guilty party will step forward and fess up. Or certain punishments might be in order. For example, Corporal Cuddling, as illustrated in this Engineer's Guide To Cats.

Now for the new items:

• 4 Refresh Endura single use eye drop containers. I've had a cold for the last few days, and I think my eyes are worse when I'm sick.


• 1 unexpected piece of plastic wrap from a take-out sandwich. On the way to a zen retreat last Sunday, we stopped at a local grocery store to pick up food. When I saw that sandwiches were being wrapped in brown paper, I ordered one. It was too late when I noticed they were wrapping them in a layer of plastic before the brown paper. *Sigh.*

A funny thing, before I get to the book winners. Beth Terry emailed me this week! I've always known there was at least one other Beth Terry out there on the web because I come up with her web site when I Google my own name. And she scooped up www.bethterry.com before I did. Anyway, Beth Terry is a motivational speaker who has a lot of energy, wants to make the world a better place, and signed the Take Back The Filter petition! She is doing our name proud and just tonight wrote about Fake Plastic Fish on her blog. (She wrote about me. I wrote about her. Is this like one of those never-ending mirrors you could get lost in forever?)

And on a sad note: The judge in Oakland's plastic bag ban case has just ruled that the city "should have more adequately studied the environmental impact of the ban before passing it into law." The city now must decide whether to challenge the ruling or pay for an environmental impact study that could cost upwards of $100,000! We don't know yet what the city will decide to do. More from the Oakland Tribune story here.

And now, (drum roll) the winners of the totally random (and Michael can confirm how random it was because the randomness came from his brain) drawing for the children's books: Owen & Mzee goes to Rachel Reinyday and My Bag & Me goes to Monica Duke. Please send me your mailing addresses and I'll get the books right out to you.

So, has everyone signed the Take Back The Filter petition? I'll let you know about my meeting with Clorox later this week. Suffice it to say, we still need signatures!
 

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Week 43 Results: 5.9 oz of plastic waste.

I know I'm late getting this post up today. But I've been working my little butt off this weekend on a project that I'm hoping to announce tomorrow.

The lesson of this week's tally is that I must always remember to specify what kind of packaging I want when people send me things. Those free kids books I wrote about last week... several of them came in plastic envelopes. Here's the tally.

Items purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 3.5oz container of Fudge hair putty & lid. No idea what kind of plastic it is. There's no recycling symbol. So, yes, I've been using hair putty in a plastic container. But it's stuff I already had. And I have one more that I bought early last year that I'm using up right now. I haven't bought hairspray since I used up my last container, and right now my hair is at that awkward in-between stage where it needs something to give it a little hold or I look like an insane person (which some might argue that I am.) Why am I letting it grow out? Ask Terrible Person. :-)

Now for the new items:

• 1 plastic FedEx envelope & piece of bubble wrap. These are kind of ironic. Anna used these materials to ship my North Pacific Gyre sample. She apologized profusely. She'd rushed them to FedEx to ship to me in time for my presentation and had no time to find any other kind of material. So now I've got this plastic. But I forgive her. Anna rocks. (Somehow I forgot to include them in an earlier tally.)


• 2 plastic wrappers from two 24-can cases of Instinct cat food. April is the cruelest, and busiest, month for an accountant who is involved in just way too many things. My goal for May: start making food for those cats and stop buying all these @%$&*#$% cans!


• 2 Tyvek envelopes used to ship Michael Recycle. Yes, Tyvek is recyclable by sending back to Dupont. But I should have asked the P/R person to use paper or cardboard.


• 2 little price tag holder thingies from some Goodwill purchases on Saturday. It's so weird. I haven't shopped for clothes in over a year. Why did I feel the need to do it during Crunchy Chicken's Buy Nothing Challenge month? Um... because she said it was okay to buy used stuff and I just had to push it? Because my current clothes are so old and raggedy that I can't even donate them in good conscience? Because the weather shot up to 85 degrees on Saturday and the heat went to my head?

Okay, that's it. Stay tuned for an announcement tomorrow. And also, later this week, remind me to tell you what I learned from my cats this weekend.
 

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Week 42 Results: .5 oz of plastic waste.

Another week during which I had zero plastic waste until the weekend. What is it about weekends? Here's the tally. All items are new since the plastic project began:

• 1 inner liner from a bag of Natural Choice Indoor Kitten food. This was something we bought a while back when we were trying to figure out what to feed them. Decided to use up the last of it this week, since their tummy troubles are all better.


• 1 outer wrap from a box of Refresh Endura eye drops. This was the first week in a while that I've had eye problems bad enough to open a new box of drops.


• 1 Refresh Endura single use eyedrop container. Saturday morning was not a happy time.


• 1 plastic capsule from a bottle of Jepson Estate Bottled Mendocino Sauvignon Blanc (2005). In all the time since I've been tallying my plastic waste, this is the first wine I've opened with a plastic capsule (the wrapper around the neck that covers the cork.) All the others, as far as I know, have been tin. So I did a bunch of research and found out more than I ever wanted to know about wine capsules and what they are made from. More on this subject in its own separate post this week.


• 1 totally unnecessary plastic stir stick from a chocolate martini at Fuzio. Whatever possessed me to order a chocolate martini? It was as bad as it sounds. No, worse! Sickeningly sweet. This abomination should never have been invented. So now I know. I won't have to wonder what a chocolate martini tastes like anymore. Hmmm... I wonder what it feels like to be whacked in the head with a bicycle pump...


• 1 plastic from a blister pack of metal gate hooks. We're using these to keep kitties out of certain rooms...

...like the back laundry area where we store all sorts of enticing things... recycling, Beth's plastic collection, shoes, a plastic bag full of yarn.... Michael had constructed a makeshift barrier of cardboard and wood to keep the kitties out of that area. This is what happened when they learned how to push their way through:


They tell us that it is yarn art and that we should praise, pet, and feed them for such powers of creativity. Instead, we rented a Zip Car and went to Urban Ore last weekend to buy a used bi-fold door and hinges to keep them in the kitchen and out of the back room. Urban Ore is an awesome place where old pieces of houses and buildings go to find new lives. The door we bought is 100% wood, unlike the vinyl doors offered at Home Depot these days, and actually matches the woodwork we already have. Michael did a great job hanging it.

How long do you think it will take the kitties to scratch a new piece of artwork into the door as they attempt to learn how the gate hook works? How long before they actually do learn to lift the hook and get out? We are taking bets.
 

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Week 41 Results: 3.7 oz of plastic waste.

I am really tired. The Green Sangha Rethinking Plastics presentation, which I co-presented with friend and former chemistry teacher Solvig on Friday, took a lot of work and mental preparation during the last two weeks. I'll tell you more about it tomorrow. I think the presentation was a great success, but even though I came home and collapsed afterwards, sleeping for 12 straight hours, I'm still tired.

By the way, I am way, way behind on reading other folks' blogs and now my in-box has 638 messages, with 213 of them unread. And these are not spam. So I apologize to my blog friends for not participating lately. It's just that I need a secretary!

It's ironic that some of the new plastic I'm buying (like shrink-wrapped cases of canned cat food) is a result of being so busy learning and campaigning about plastics that I don't have time to figure out plastic-free alternatives. A couple of weeks ago, reader Jennifer left a comment with a recipe to try for homemade cat food that could involve less waste than buying cans or bags if I can find a relatively easy and economical way to buy whole chickens plastic-free. She wrote: Good luck with the food... an easy way to make wet cat food yourself is to pressure cook a chicken (bones and all) with a few veggies (carrots, sweet potatoes, apples) for an hour. The bones turn to mush and are really healthy for them. Just mix and serve... makes enough for a week for one cat. .

So, I need to find a little balance among the different aspects of my life... caring for myself, and Michael, and kittens, as well as the rest of the planet. And holding down a regular job. And doing this whole plastic activist blogging and campaigning thing. I have a lot to write about and many, many ideas all jostling together in my brain, and not enough time and energy to do it all. So I may have to cut down on the number of posts per week for a while. Until I get caught up.

Or I might not. We'll see. We'll just see. At any rate, here's this past week's tally. Items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 plastic membership card from the San Francisco Film Society. I have renewed my membership this year and received a brand new plastic membership card. Seems like a waste, doesn't it? Maybe I'll write and suggest they go back to a paper membership card, if I find the time.


• 1 32-oz bottle Biokleen laundry soap (#2 plastic) and cap. We are using Ecover powdered laundry soap right now that comes in a recycled cardboard box with a cardboard scooper. I know I could make my own laundry soap like Just Ducky does. But please see above comments about time and tiredness and energy.

New plastic waste:

• Shrink-wrap from a 24-can case of Instinct cat food. See above. And as I mentioned last time, buying the cans individually does not save plastic. The cans are shipped to the store in plastic and removed from the packaging before you buy them.
  
  And one more thing about cat food: I have received numerous comments with opinions about whether cats should eat wet food or dry kibble. I tend to believe those that say cats do better with wet food because it's closer to what they would eat in the wild. Cats eat small rodents and birds. Meat, bones, water, all in one package. They don't eat grains. How could they? Grains have to be cooked. They may eat a small amount of vegetable matter. And, according to what I've read, they don't really drink water, getting their liquid from the bodies of their prey.
  
  Crunchy food is good for their teeth. So I have been mixing in a tiny bit of dry food with the wet this week to give them a bit of crunch. And if I can get it together to pressure cook the whole chicken, bones and all, with a few veggies, that should be perfect. I'm not going to put them on a diet of all dry food because that is how cats end up with kidney failure. And I just can't do that to them.


• 1 plastic salad dressing container. *Sigh* Went out to lunch after the Rethinking Plastics presentation and we made sure to choose a restaurant that uses durable plates and bowls and cutlery. I had no idea they'd put my salad dressing in a disposable plastic container.

That's it for last week. Until Friday, I actually thought I was going to finally have a week with no plastic in the tally at all. No such luck. But that will be a good week indeed. Tomorrow, I'll write about the plastics presentation and tell you about how it went. For right now, I'm going to take another long nap I think.
 

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Week 40 Results: .8 oz of plastic waste.

Oh dear. So you know how last week I had zero new plastic waste and only stuff I'd purchased before I started this project? Well, this week, it's all just new new new stuff. Some unavoidable and some completely and embarassingly avoidable. So here goes.

New plastic waste:

• 1 plastic wrap from a case of Instinct canned chicken cat food. Each case contains 24 cans in a cardboard box wrapped in plastic. It's the secret plastic you don't normally see if you buy the cans straight off the shelf. And I think all canned cat food comes packaged this way. But the dry food gives them the runs, and I keep reading that dry food is not good for cats anyway. So until I'm ready to cook them food from scratch on a regular basis, this will be a continuing source of plastic in the tally.


• Plastic window from a Taco Bell quesadilla wrapper. This is the truly embarrassing admission for the week. I don't know what happened to me. Okay, yes I do know. I left the house on an empty stomach and got sucked into Taco Bell totally impulsively as I was passing by. Taco Bell! It's not like I don't live in an area with great local Mexican restaurants. I do! But I was starving and Taco Bell was there, and I hadn't had cheese in a while, and I thought, "How can a little quesadilla hurt anything?" Didn't know about the plastic window in the wrapper. So I'm totally busted!


• 1 wrapper from a See's Candies chocolate lollipop. Busted again. Someone offered it to me at work, and it was opened and in my mouth before I knew what hit me. But I assure you that I enjoyed it thoroughly.


• Plastic from a bunch of organic bananas. As I've mentioned before, I have no idea why the organic bananas always have plastic around the stems when the conventional ones don't.


• 1 tiny plastic insert from a tiny glass bottle of Tea Tree oil. More on what I'm using this for in my post on Monday.


• 1 plastic seal from a new Preserve toothbrush container. The container and toothbrush are recyclable by returning them to Recycline. I'm holding onto my old ones to send back a bunch all at once. But I don't think this tiny bit of plastic is recyclable.


• 1 plastic pour insert from a 1.75 litre glass bottle of Smirnoff vodka. I use this stuff diluted for cleaning (smells better than vinegar, even if it is more expensive) and for my mouthwash recipe. I would buy cheaper vodka for the purpose, as Radical Garbageman urged me one time, but the cheaper vodka comes in plastic bottles!


• 1 plastic seal from a jar of Fudge Is My Life dark chocolate sauce. Oh My Gawad! This stuff rocks. But I didn't notice the clear plastic seal until I got it home.
  
  I do notice, though that I am changing fundamentally in the way I shop. The other night, I had a craving for chocolate sauce and the only store open was Safeway. So I thought, whatever, I'll just get some Hershey's or Smuckers in a glass jar. No one will know as long as it's not in plastic.
  
  But when I got to the chocolate sauce aisle and read the ingredients on the labels: high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated soy bean oil, I just couldn't go there. I just couldn't. I was actually repulsed by the whole idea. And then I wandered around in Safeway for a while feeling really depressed. So I decided to buy some cream to make my own hot fudge. But the only organic cream they had was O Organics and Horizon, and being a member of the Organic Consumers Association, I'd read all kinds of terrible things about those brands. And I just couldn't go there either.
  
  So I walked home chocolate-free and depressed. And the next day, I bought the very expensive jar of Fudge Is My Life. Here are the ingredients: Cream, Brown Sugar, Cocoa Powder (processed with alkali), Sugar, Butter, Honey and Salt. So yeah, I could have made it from scratch. But sometimes you just want to scoop fudge out of a jar and eat it straight up with no waiting around. And that's what I did.

So that's the tally for last week. And now I have a cat question for you. Do kitty's whiskers usually fall out? Ever since we've had her, Arya's had these two really funny white Martian antenna-looking whiskers sticking straight up from her forehead (in addition to the normal whiskers sticking out the sides of her face.) Then, one day this week, she suddenly only had one. And the next day, none. Her antennae are gone! Where could they be? Is this normal? Just wondering.
 

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Week 39 Results: 4.3 oz of plastic waste.

Another milestone reached. Zero new plastic waste for the week! Everything in the tally was purchased before I started this project. I'm sure there'll be more new plastic to add to the tally before the year is up, but it's nice to have a week with no new plastic!

So, here's this week's tally. Items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 outer cap and inner "sprinkle cap" from a broken glass spice bottle. One of our rascally kitties climbed onto the spice shelf and knocked the glass bottle onto the floor. Some might cite such an occurrence as justification for unbreakable plastic spice bottles. Fortunately, it happened while I was in the kitchen and neither human nor feline was harmed. But instead of blaming it on the cat or the type of bottle, we simply moved the spice shelf to another wall of the kitchen away from the window the kitty was trying to reach. So far, since the move, Soots and Arya have had no further interest in this shelf. But we have learned that glass, while environmentally preferable, requires more care than plastic and we need to make sure it's out of the reach of curious cats.


• Plastic from a blister 4-pack of GE nightlight bulbs. We're using the last bulb from this pack now, and I'll have to purchase more when that one burns out. I was thinking of switching to an LED night light, which would last longer and use less electricity, but I'm wondering if it's really worth it. These standard bulbs are 4-watts. I don't think they're destroying the planet. Plus, I haven't been able to find any nightlight bulbs, LED or otherwise, packaged without plastic. If you know of some, please tell me!


• 1 2-qt container of Kikkoman soy sauce (#7 plastic) plus cap. #7 plastic? This confuses me because #7 means "Other" and when describing petroleum-based plastic, usually refers to Polycarbonate, that hard plastic that Nalgene bottles were made from. But this bottle is soft and feels to me like #2 plastic. So I have no idea what this "Other" could be. Anyway, I found out today that Berkeley Whole Foods sells soy sauce in bulk from a spigot. I just poured the last bit from this container into a smaller glass bottle today. When that finally runs out, I'll take the bottle to Whole Foods and refill it.


• Plastic wrappers from 2 Pepto Bismal chewable tablets. Tummy probs earlier this week and then spent the weekend on the couch with aches and chills. All better now.


• 1 10-oz plastic bag of Jeremiah's Pick coffee. Found in the back of the freezer and used up this week. I don't often make coffee at home, preferring those very expensive yuppie coffee drinks in my stainless steel travel mug while I'm out in the world. I think the reason is that if I don't actually buy and brew coffee, I can fool myself into believing that I'm not really a coffee drinker. Right. Just like those people who only smoke "socially" and never buy their own cigarettes but bum them off their friends every chance they get. (And no, I haven't been one of them in many years!)

But this is a good place for a coffee segue. Did you know that March is National Caffeine Awareness Month? Well it is. I am fully aware that caffeine is an evil, beastly chemical, and it's such a darned shame that a drink as thrillingly delicious as coffee is loaded with it. (Surely the thrill has nothing to do with the caffeine.) Anyway, the web site, Howtodothings.com has a whole Caffeine Resource Guide, including 10 Ways to Reuse Coffee Grounds, How to Compost with Coffee, and How to Endure Caffeine Withdrawal, as well as other caffeine-related articles, including one that I don't even want to think about.

I love this guide because I can go either way with it. I can keep buying coffee (Fair Trade, of course, and from a bulk bin rather than pre-packaged in plastic) and recycle the grounds in earth-friendly ways, or I can learn how to give it up and survive the inevitable withdrawal (Or as Michael would say, "withdraweral.") headache and crankiness. Don't think I can quit it? Come on! I've done it hundreds of times!
 

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Week 38 Results: 5.5 oz of plastic waste.

More kitty plastic this week. I gave up on the hypoallergenic food from the vet, which actually made them both sick, and fed them boiled chicken, white rice, and pumpkin this week. More on that in a future post. I also purchased a bottle of Animal Essentials Plant Enzymes & Probiotics, which of course comes in a plastic bottle.

The thing is, when it comes to Soots and Arya, I would do anything to help them feel better. These cats are pure, unconditional love. And I don't mean that I think they love me or that I'm anthropomorphizing them. I mean that when I look in their faces, I get such a feeling of joy that I think I might understand a tiny fraction of what it feels like to be a mother. They can bite and scratch and poop on the floor and ruin the slippers I just finished knitting, and none of that matters.

So anyway, I cooked them chicken that we already had in the freezer in plastic packaging. I didn't buy this chicken, and I wouldn't have eaten it myself. But since we already had it, I figured it was better to use it up than to go out and buy new chicken. And even though it was probably purchased since I began the plastics project, I'm going to add it to the "Before" list since I didn't buy it and it wasn't originally intended for me. If I need more for them after this is gone, I'll get it in my own container from the butcher counter at Whole Foods or one of the two local butcher shops in my neighborhood.

So, here's this week's tally. Items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began (or in this case purchased by my partner originally for himself):

• 2 bags of Foster Farms skinless boneless chicken tenders. Fed to the kittens.


• 1 Styrofoam tray & 1 plastic wrap from a package of Safeway chicken breasts. Also fed to the kittens.


• 1 48-oz bottle of Hershey's chocolate syrup & cap (#2 plastic). Finally finished this week. I got out the very last bit using Melanie's and Heather T's suggestion of filling up the bottle with milk and shaking to get out the last bit of chocolaty goodness. I'm planning to make chocolate syrup from scratch using this recipe.

New plastic waste:

• 1 prescription bottle and cap (#2 plastic). As I've mentioned before, prescription bottles cannot be refilled by pharmacies legally in California.


• 1 plastic seal and foam insert from the new bottle of Animal Essentials Plant Enzymes & Probiotics for the kittens. I'm hoping this will help get their digestive systems back in shape.

So that's my story for this week. All about cats and cat poop and cat food. Hopefully, I'll find something more interesting for the non-catophile readers soon. But I can only report life as I live it, right?
 

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Week 37 Results: 3.5 oz of plastic waste.

My kitties have been conspiring to increase my weekly plastic waste. I know that's what they're talking about when they're curled up together pretending to sleep. Soots decided to get diarrhea and start pooping outside his litter box so that in desperation, I'd go out and buy new litter, medicine, and food, all in plastic bags. Such a bad kitty!

I'm about at my wits end. Just ask Michael. The vet gave me special hypoallergenic food for him (which, naturally, comes in a plastic bag) as well as de-worming medicine (5 mini plastic bags). We're also trying a different kind of litter (World's Best Cat Litter) which comes in a plastic bag. The new food is not helping and neither is the medicine so far. But I gotta say, World's Best Cat Litter works sooooo much better than SwheatsScoop, I'm almost ready to say, "Screw it. Give me the one that works even if it comes in a plastic bag." It clumps much better. It stays cleaner. You need less of it. And it smells better. *Sigh*

So, here's this week's tally. Items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 hydrogen peroxide bottle & cap (#2 plastic). Used this up trying to get mold out of a cotton produce bag. More on that issue later.


• 1 Safeway ground cumin bottle & cap (#1 plastic). Now that this is gone, will be buying only bulk cumin from Whole Foods or Rainbow or Berkeley Bowl and filling my own glass jar.

New plastic waste:

• 1 Refresh Endura single-use eye drop container


• 1 piece of plastic tape from a bunch of organic bananas.


• 1 plastic seal from the neck of a ceramic container of St. Benoit yogurt. Our last bit of homemade yogurt went bad before we could make more. Have to start over again.


• 1 plastic bag of World's Best Cat Litter I'm afraid this won't be the last. This stuff just works so much better than the SwheatScoop. Anyone else have suggestions for cat litter that is clumpable and flushable and doesn't come in a plastic bag? (And for those who may be new to this blog, yes we flush the cats' litter because they've tested negative for toxoplasma gondii, the parasite that kills sea otters. You shouldn't flush cat litter if your cats have not been tested or if they go outside.)


• 5 mini plastic bags of de-worming medication.

Now, just look at this:



They look like they're sleeping, right? That's what they want you to think. They're actually speaking in silent code, trying to plan their next plasticky move. What can I do?

Seriously, (and this next bit is going to be gross, so if you don't want to read about cat poop, turn away now) Soots has had diarrhea for over a month. I took him to the vet weeks ago and they dewormed him, put him on special food, and gave me some kitty pepto bismal for him. It cleared up for maybe a week and then came back with a vengeance. Then, in the last couple of weeks, he decided not to use the litter box to poop. (He still uses it to pee.) He'll go on the floor a foot or two away from the box, but he'll only go in the box itself if I catch him scratching the floor and put him in the box right before he starts to go. Then, I praise him and pet him and give him a tiny treat. But his little pea brain doesn't remember it the next time.

We got a second litter box and filled it with the new kind of litter. Arya will use either one. She doesn't seem to care what kind of litter she uses. And Soots will pee in either one but still wants to poop on the floor. And it's not like he's trying to get to the litter box and having accidents before he makes it there. No, he wanders around on the floor scratching here and there, basically dilly dallying while I'm tapping my foot waiting, before he finally chooses the perfect spot on the floor to go.

The new food from the vet is not helping the diarrhea, and nothing we've done is stopping the floor pooping. FPF reader and friend Axelle thinks that if we get the diarrhea cleared up, the cat will use the box again. She has a recipe for us to try using rice, chicken, and pumpkin. We haven't done it yet, thinking that the vet knew what she was talking about, but maybe we will this week if the new food doesn't start to help.

Anyone else? I'm so tired of being on cat poop duty!
 

 

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Week 36 Results: .6 oz of plastic waste. The day has finally come!

Oh joy! I've been waiting for the week when my plastic waste would finally fit easily in my own two hands, and this was that week. Don't get me wrong. We still have plastic in this house that we're using up, and the tally will go up again. But it's nice to savor small victories.

Items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• Approximately 7 feet of packing tape. I pulled this tape off an old box I cut up to use to make a barrier to keep kitties from chewing electrical cords. In fact, I'm so tickled with Michael's and my ingenuity, I'm gonna post photos of the setup below.

New plastic waste:

• 2 Refresh Endura single-use eye drop containers

Now, here's my plastic-free kitty project for the week. I needed a way to keep the kittens from getting to the tangled mass of electrical cords behind our TV/stereo stand. I wish I had a before picture to show you. It was a real mess back there and the kitties loved it.

Lots of people were recommending I get one of those plastic cord covers, but a plastic cord cover is made from, you know, plastic. I tried making a jalapeno pepper spray and coating the cords with it to keep them from chewing, but it didn't really work. The only good solution would be a physical barrier. The problem was that the TV stand was open on all 4 sides, and the cats would basically dive through. Here's what the front looks like now.


I know the cardboard doesn't look so great, but really only the cats can see it. I had to lie on the floor to take the picture. From an adult human vantage-point, it's not very noticeable. So anyway, the cats can't get through to the back very easily. But they still could climb over if there were enough enticement, like lots of loose tangled cords. So this is what I did in the back:




The shoe box was Michael's idea. There are holes in the bottom through which the cords come up from under the stand. The Smart Strip Power Strip, which I wrote about in a previous post, wouldn't completely fit in the box. But that's okay because having it stick out makes accessing the switch easier. The cardboard is attached using brown paper tape, which we already had. Any other cords that were loose or dangly I tried to find a way to tape down... tape to the wall, to back of the TV, to whatever. There's still one loose cord leading to a speaker, but it's in the back and so far they haven't noticed it.

This might not be the most beautiful solution in the world, but it required no new materials to construct and so far is working just fine. I haven't caught either of them back there since I set it up on Monday, which is the point.
 

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Week 35 Results: 50.1 oz of plastic waste. HP Sucks!

I like to think of myself as pretty Zen, mellow, going with the flow. Eh hmm... my ego likes to think that about me. So I write posts about loving what is and being mindful of little things like cheese wrappers and taking time out for silence. But sometimes, a gal just wants to vent. And this is one of those times. HP sucks, ya'll! HP can bite my ass!

The beautiful 19" LCD monitor you see in the photo is not just a nice backdrop for this week's plastic waste. It is this week's plastic waste. And metal. And who knows what else. And no amount of learning to fix stuff or even learning to fix stuff will make it better. Here's the tally:

Items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 plastic seal from a bottle of cayenne pepper. Purchased a long time ago and never opened until this week. It does seem to still be good.


• 1 Liquid Silk lube bottle (#3 PVC plastic!) and pump. I already discussed this product in my post last week about using olive oil as personal lubricant. Normally, when I have a product in a plastic bottle, I finish up the rest of it before adding the container to the tally. This time though, after learning about the ingredients in Liquid Silk, I decided to discard the rest of the bottle using the method required by the State of California for disposing of PPCPs (pharmaceuticals and personal care products.) I mixed it up with a bunch of cat litter, poured it into an old milk carton, and put it in the trash. Flushing is NOT recommended for products that contain harmful chemicals. Unfortunately, the landfill is the best option we have for stuff like this.


• 1 HP vs19d LCD monitor. So here's the rant. Last Saturday, I turned on my computer as usual, pressed the button on my monitor, and nothing happened. The computer came on. The monitor did not. I made sure all the cables were connected. I plugged it into different outlets. Nothing. Not even a blink. I called HP. The monitor, which is only 1-1/2 years old, is out of warranty. The 3-year warranty I purchased with the system only covers the computer, not the monitor. But they'd be happy to sell me a new one.
  
  No way. I'm the girl who fixes things instead of replacing them. So I got out my Yellow Pages (One reason to keep a Yellow Pages around... you never know when your computer will go down and you'll need to find a computer technician without looking them up via your computer!) and found a local guy, Leon Pang at Domino Computer (he's awesome, by the way) who said he might be able to fix the monitor. I headed straight over to his place and dropped it off.
  
  Monday, he called me with bad news. He had opened up the monitor, tested the circuits, figured out where the problem was and what part was needed (a particular board), called HP, only to be told that HP will not sell replacement boards for these monitors. They will only sell a whole new monitor. This board is not something you can find on eBay or elsewhere. It's specific to that monitor and if HP won't sell it, you're screwed.
  
  So I bought a lightly-used monitor from a guy on Craigslist to replace that one. The "new" one is a Dell. I'm hoping to have better luck with it. In the meantime, I'm stuck with this piece of HP crap in my plastic purgatory (and I say crap because the computer I bought from HP [Pavilion d4600y, if you want to know] has been one headache after another too, although because of the warranty I've been able to get it fixed each time.)
  
  I know there are places to take our old electronics to be recycled. GreenSight is a program that Costco uses that says it "conforms to a 'Zero Landfill/No Export' Policy by working with only ISO 14001 certified partners who recycle and refine these materials for remanufacturing into new products." That's fine. It's better than sending toxic e-waste over seas. But wouldn't it be better if equipment were manufactured so that it could be repaired when broken? Why does my LCD screen and plastic housing have to be melted down and recycled when all that's needed is a small board inside?
  
  Anyway, I'm stuck with the broken monitor because of my policy this year of holding onto all my plastic waste instead of sending it off god knows where to be recycled. And believe it or not, I actually estimated the weight of the plastic parts by taking a screw driver to the thing myself and separating out the metal from the plastic because that's the sort of thing that someone like me does on a Sunday afternoon after cooking huevos rancheros completely from scratch. More on that later.
  
  So, did I just let this issue go? Of course not. I've already written to the CEO of HP as well as told my story on the web site of Californians Against Waste, an organization that is working on legislation to handle toxic e-waste. Here's the text of my message to HP via the CEO's contact form:
  
  Dear Mark Hurd:
  
  Nowadays, most companies are trying to "green" their operations. I'm sure HP is looking into ways to be more environmentally friendly. With that in mind, I'd like to share a disappointing experience I had this week with an HP product:
  
  A year and a half ago I bought an HP desktop computer and 19" LCD monitor (vs19d) directly from HP. Since then, I've had many problems with the computer and even had to replace a burned-out power supply. But since I had purchased a 3-year warranty, the problems were resolved by your support staff.
  
  Then, last week, my monitor stopped working. It wouldn't power up. I called HP and was told the monitor was not covered by the 3-year warranty and that I'd just have to buy a new one. I asked if they could fix it, and they said it would cost more than the price of a new monitor to fix and they would not do it.
  
  So I took the monitor to a local computer technician, who opened it up, tested the circuits, figured out where the problem was, called HP to order a replacement board, and was told that they will not sell these parts. They will only sell a whole new monitor. This technician is from China and told me that in China he would have had access to a replacement part but that they were not available in the U.S.
  
  It is this kind of business policy that is creating so much toxic e-waste for the planet. Even if the monitor can be recycled, why should the energy and transportation be expended to recycle an old monitor and manufacture a new one when all the old monitor needs is a new board and there are computer-savvy technicians who are capable of installing such a part?
  
  I believe that for computer companies to go green, it's important to create modular products with parts that can easily be replaced rather than requiring the entire machine to be trashed. And I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter.
  
  I have reported this story to Californians Against Waste (http://www.cawrecycles.org), an organization that is working on ways to eliminate the problem of e-waste, and I plan on writing about it on my own personal web site, http://www.fakeplasticfish.com.
  
  I would love to be able to report that HP is taking steps to correct this problem. Thanks so much for your time.
  
  Beth Terry
  
  As always, I'll let you know if I hear anything back from HP. Whew. Now I can put this puppy to rest.

And now on to this week's new plastic waste:

• 1 Refresh Endura single-use eye drop container.


• 1 plastic cap from a glass bottle of Kahlúa. Whatever possessed me to buy a bottle of liquor with a plastic cap? It surely wasn't a necessity. But a few months ago I wasn't being as careful as I am this year. I have no other excuse.

Now I'm interested to hear your frustrating (or successful) electronics stories.
 

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Week 34 Results: 2.6 oz. of plastic waste

I've finished my last plastic-wrapped block of cheese for a while. I'm not saying I won't ever buy cheese again. But I am going to cut back significantly, to spare the plastic and also my cholesterol count. It's okay. As you've seen from my recipes (and will continue to see) we eat very well without it. So, let's get started with the weekly tally.

Items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 plastic lid from a metal can of curry powder. As I use up my containers of spices, I replace the spices from the bulk jars at Whole Foods, Berkeley Bowl, or Rainbow Grocery.


• 1 32-oz bottle of Albertson's white vinegar and 1 plastic cap. The bottle is #1 PETE plastic and is recyclable in Oakland. The cap is not recyclable. Both bottle and cap will go into my plastic collection, however. I've since switched to Spectrum Organics distilled white vinegar (for general household cleaning) in a glass bottle.

Now for the new plastic waste:

• 4 Refresh Endura single-use eye drop containers.


• 1 plastic cork from a bottle of Rosenblum Cellars red wine. This bottle was brought over by friends for the lentil loaf dinner. I've since recycled the bottle and can't remember what varietal it was. Doesn't matter. I believe all Rosenblum's wines come with plastic corks.


• 1 wrapper from a block of Grafton Village 4-year old cheddar. Good-bye cheese. I'll try not to miss you too much.


• 6 inches of packing tape from a package delivered to me this week. This was an EarthPak hip pack I ordered many months ago. More on this item and apparently troubled company in a future post.

So, what's the most difficult thing you guys have given up for environmental or socially responsible reasons? Did you give it up completely or do you indulge every once in a while? Is there something that you enjoy too much to ever give up, or to give up right now?
 

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Week 33 Results: .8 oz. of plastic waste

We are besieged! It's been raining non-stop for days and days, and what that means are hordes of ants running for cover. Our kitchen is over-run. I mixed up an anti-ant spray using vinegar, dish soap, water, and cinnamon. The vinegar and soap kill them. The cinnamon's supposed to keep new ones from entering, but it doesn't seem to work. Why am I mentioning this? Because of the first item in this week's plastic tally:

Non-recyclable items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 bag of C&H raw cane sugar. The bag wasn't closed properly. The ants took over, so I ended up having to pour out half a bag of sugar. What a waste. This is the last plastic bag of sugar, and from now on, I'll be buying it from the bulk bin and storing it in Mason jars to prevent another ant invasion. For right now, I'm trying a new strategy which may work or may be disasterous. I poured some sugar into a little bowl and put it in the cupboard under the sink. I'm wondering if this will satisfy the ants so that they aren't crawling all over my countertop and I don't have to kill so many.
  
  I know that the best thing to do is figure out how they're getting in and plug up the entrances. But honestly, these are magic warlock ants. They just appear out of no where. I have tried with a flashlight and magnifying glass to follow their trails and figure out their entrance. They don't have one. Their trails just magically appear and disappear. Really. They are agents of Satan or maybe spies for George Bush. Besides appeasing them with their own bowl of sugar and killing the ones that appear on the counters with vinegar and soap, what else can I do??? (And no, I'm not going to buy poisoned ant traps or sprays.)


• 1 piece of plastic tab that broke off a Tupperware-like container. Not much to say about this one except that the container is now harder to open and close.

Now for the new plastic waste:

• 5 Refresh Endura single-use eye drop containers (#4 plastic).


• 2 plastic lids from some containers of soy sauce and wasabi. For my birthday dinner a few weeks ago, Michael ordered sushi and paid a deposit to be able to bring it home in a reusable tray so there'd be no plastic waste. Unfortunately, the restaurant didn't get the idea entirely and sent along a couple of cardboard containers of soy sauce and wasabi with plastic lids. So, here are those lids.


• 1 plastic window from a 4-pack of CFL lightbulbs as well as a tiny piece of bubble wrap from inside the box. I'm hoping these will be the last CFLs we will buy before eventually switching over to LEDs. My Ace Hardware that sold a completely plastic-free box of CFLs no longer carries them, in favor of this 4-pack subsidized by PG&E which only costs $2.99.

So what's the weather like where you live? Rain? Cold? Snow? Wind? Or balmy, tropical days? What are your winter challenges and do any of them involve plastic?
 

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Week 32 Results: 3.7 oz. of plastic waste

The weight is up a bit this week, but with only 6 items in the tally (I count container and top as two separate items) it's the lowest number of plastic items yet.

Recyclable items used up this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 laundry detergent bottle (#2 plastic). I'm not sure what was in this container originally because it's missing its label. I don't need it right now, so it's going into my stash, but I may reuse it if the need arises. As I mentioned before, I'm not actually recycling any plastic this year until I can make sure it's not poisoning children in China.

Non-recyclable items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:

• 1 cap from the laundry detergent bottle.


• 1 wrapper from a roll of Kirkland Signature paper towels. We have almost a whole case of these still and are trying very hard not to use them. We wipe the kitchen counters with cut-up rags and use cloth towels whenever we can. But we haven't entirely graduated from paper. I'm hoping we can make our 1 case last for the next ten years.

Now for the new plastic waste:

• 1 Refresh Endura single-use eye drop container (#4 plastic). Don't know how I am managing to survive with so few eye drops applications these days, but I'm just grateful my corneas have been cooperating.


• 1 Grafton Village Cheese Company 1-year cheddar cheese wrapper. I have one more small block of cheese to use up and then I won't be buying more for a while.


• 1 disposable ink cartridge from a Lamy fountain pen. This was the original cartridge that came with the pen. I've now replaced it with a converter that allows me to refill it with ink from a bottle, so I won't have any more of these cartridges to throw away. Here's the original post where I wrote about these pens and ink.

And here's a story about ACTUAL fake plastic fish in Australia. Um... what's a tuna toss? Can someone please explain this to me?