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.)
 

 

Arya's Big Plastic Thing

Oh, da hoomiliashun!



Well, what can you do when little kitties just lick off the bitter lotion we put on their sutures to keep them from doing just that? Bitter! Yum Yum! Anyone need a plastic bottle of bitter lotion? My cat thinks it tastes like dessert.

At least Arya's fur will grow back. Some cats look like this all over... on purpose.

Arya would thank you all for your nice words and wishes for her recovery, but she's a cat and too busy trying to figure out how to get that darned lampshade off her head (and plus, she's kinda stoned right now, the little druggie), so I will thank you all instead. Thank you so very, very much.

The CRRA Conference presentation went really well today despite my lack of sleep last night and weekend of kitty worries. Hope to write more about that and get back to my regular blogging schedule very soon. (Maybe I'll combine plastic tallies for two weeks this coming Sunday.)

Oh! And I keep forgetting to mention that I was happy to be included as an honorary contributor to the new monthly Green Moms Blog Carnival, the first of which was hosted by Organic Mania this week. The organizers dubbed me and a few other child-free women "mothers of the earth," but I actually think I prefer "kitty mama" at this point. Each month, the posts on the carnival will all address a particular topic, this month's being global warming. I liked the challenge of relating plastic to global warming in the post I wrote this month and look forward to finding further ways to stretch my understanding of the impacts of plastic on the environment.
 

 

Happy Weekend, Sad Weekend

Hi all. Not feeling much like blogging about plastic because of something that happened last night. Want the happy news or the sad news first?

Happy #1: Wonderful picnic Saturday afternoon in Dolores Park, SF with other green bloggers: Green Bean, Arduous, Kale for Sale, Jennconspiracy, Car(bon)free in California. The picnic was wonderful. You can read about it on Jenn's blog here, as I don't have the energy to write much tonight. (Oh, but I do have to publicly confess that Jenn was right and I was wrong about the weather. I expected to freeze at 4pm in SF. She expected it to be beautiful. She was right, although I did have to put on my sweatshirt.)

Happy #2: Michael ran the SF Half Marathon this morning and came in at 1:43! Awesome. That's 6 minutes faster than his Disneyland time in September, and SF has major hills! (BTW, he ran the FIRST half, for those who know what that means.) Michael rocks.

Sad: My little baby Arya, about whom I've been bitching for weeks, fell off Michael's high shoulders yesterday afternoon onto the hard kitchen floor and broke her front leg. We've been crying off and on since last night. Took her to emergency vet. The break is too high up for them to stabilize the leg with splint/cast, so she needs surgery. Can't do anything until tomorrow, so she's on pain meds until then.

Arya spent the night in her cramped little cat carrier because we had nothing else to put her in at 1am when we finally brought her home from pet hospital. This morning, I put her in bed with me and held her and petted her while Michael was out running his 1/2 marathon. When he got home, we went out to Pet Food Express and bought her a brand new metal cage (yes, with a plastic floor.) The idea of going through the hassle to find something used on the weekend when my baby was in pain was unthinkable to me. I wanted her out of that tiny carrier and into a nice big cage where she could see and interact with us but be protected from herself and Soots (who doesn't understand why she can't come out and play.)

Arya's going to have to live in that cage for several weeks until her leg heals. Right now, I think she prefers it. It makes her feel safe. When out of the cage, she wants to crawl behind the sofa to hide. But what's going to happen as she gets better and the pain subsides, but we still can't let her out to run around and climb on things? We're going to have to figure out ways to entertain her so she doesn't go stir crazy.

Oh my poor baby. I wish I could trade places. Really.

Happy #3: Oh! Not to leave you down in the dumps. I just remembered that we're starting to get actual tomatoes on our plants. We saw two of them today. One is the size of a small plum. The other is smaller than my thumb. (I rhyme!)

Okay, back to being sad again.
 

 

Dear GPC Pet Products,

Here's my weekly consumer letter. Okay, not actually weekly. I didn't write one last week. But I sent this one twice, both as an email (via http://www.gpcpet.com/Contact/default.aspx) and as an actual letter. Does that make up for last week?

July 7, 2008

GPC Pet Products
1600 Oregon Street
Muscatine , IA 52761

Dear GPC Pet Products:

I have been using World’s Best Cat Litter for several months now. I find it to be very effective and efficient; a little goes a long way. I have two cats, and compared to other litters I have tried, World’s Best clumps the best, tracks less, and smells better.

However, there is one aspect of the product that I don’t care for, and that is the packaging. It saddens me each time I must dispose of the heavy plastic bag, a bag that is not recyclable in my community and that is made from a non-biodegradable material. I urge you to consider switching to a biodegradable paper bag instead.

I have tried SweatScoop cat litter, which is packaged in a heavy paper bag. I appreciate that the bag can be recycled at the end of its life or composted, unlike the World’s Best Cat Litter bag. To be honest, I’m torn between the two brands. Because, while World’s Best Cat Litter seems to work better than the SweatScoop, it also seems to be less environmentally-friendly.

As you probably know, many consumers are becoming more and more environmentally conscious these days and want to do the right thing for the planet. Please help us to keep plastic out of our landfills and incinerators by switching to biodegradable or compostable packaging.

Sincerely,
Beth Terry

I feel that if I'm going to buy products packaged in plastic, the very least I can do is write to the company and ask them to reconsider their packaging choices. It's the least any of us can do. Really. It's soooo easy. Why don't more people do it?
 

 

My cats are not canaries! (Are they?)

The Environmental Working Group just released a study of toxic chemicals in cats and dogs. Turns out, they are loaded with them. In samples from 20 dogs and 40 cats, they found "48 of the 70 chemicals they looked for, including PCBs, PBDEs, phthalates, and heavy metals...." Levels of some of these chemicals were higher than in humans. So EWG has created a new organization called Pets For The Environment to "create a healthy environment for pets and people by demanding toxic chemical reform legislation in the U.S."

According to Jane Houlihan, VP for Research at EWG, "The presence of chemicals in dogs and cats sounds a cautionary warning for the present and future health of children as well. This study demonstrating the chemical body burden of dogs and cats is a wake-up call for stronger safety standards from industrial chemical exposures that will protect all members of our families, including our pets." In other words, our pets are like the canaries in the coal mines. For more information, read the April 17 Enviroblog story.

So where do these chemicals come from? Outdoor pets can be exposed to pesticides on a daily basis. But so can indoor animals when we track those pesticides into our homes on our shoes. Fortunately, Michael and I maintain a shoe-free home. Our shoes make it only as far as the shelf inside the back door. So how else might our indoor kitties be in danger?

We don't cook in Teflon anymore, one of the sources of Perfluorochemicals that poison our pets. But did we opt for the stain-proof treatment when we had our carpet cleaned a few years ago? I can't remember, but that would be another source of PFCs.

We avoided buying them scratching posts or kitty climbing trees covered in synthetic carpet, but what about the floor carpet that they roll around on on a daily basis? I have no idea what this carpet is made from. We are renters and can't just pull it up and replace it. Is it dangerous for them? I don't know.

Flame retardants in furniture are another source of toxins for pets. What is our blue chair covered in? Our futon cover? The cushions on the foot rests? The foamy cat bed that was given to us by our friends who delivered the cats in the first place? How can we know?

We haven't bought them new plastic toys because, as you know, I'm avoiding new plastic. But what about the few plastic toys we already had? They love this blue ball that came from who knows where. What's it made of? I don't know. But it's now hidden in my Freecycle bag. I don't think they'll miss it.

Soots and Arya love the window blinds. Love them so much that I think we're going to have to replace them (the blinds, not the cats) when we move from here some day. But fortunately, our blinds are made from metal, not PVC as many are. And we don't have any PVC flooring or doors or shades.

But I've written before about the cords they love to chew. Electrical cords are covered in PVC. A few nights ago, I went around and coated some of them with Vaseline sprinked with cayenne pepper as a deterrent. Yeah, gross. Hopefully gross to Soots and Arya too. And we keep them locked out of the room where our computers live.

I've also written about the cans of food we feed them, undoubtedly lined with BPA. I am now more motivated than ever to make their food from scratch. I just have to find an affordable source of whole un-plastic-wrapped, free-range chicken. The organic chickens at Enzo's at Market Hall are $2.89/lb. That's a lot for chicken, right? We eat so little meat ourselves that we really don't worry about the price. But these kitties are obligate carnivores. They require much more meat than we do. And we don't want to go broke feeding them. So I'm committed to taking the time to figure this out within the next two weeks. Please hold me to it!

Environmental Working Group has a whole list of healthy pet tips. They are worth checking out. But still, how can we be sure that we are keeping them as safe as possible? This must be how parents feel about protecting their children. We do the best we can.


But is it enough?
 

 

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.
 

 

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.
 

 

Weekly Recipe(s): Dinner in a Pumpkin --> Therapeutic Cat Food

The nice thing about pumpkins is that they last a really, really long time. We've had this one since Thanksgiving and finally got around to doing something with it. We also had some cabbage that was getting old, so I Googled "pumpkin cabbage recipe," not really expecting to find much, and ended up with this fun meal called Dinner In A Pumpkin. Apparently, it's something people serve to their kids on Halloween because, you know, that's the only time of year Safeway has real pumpkins.

The original recipe calls for ground beef. I opted for ground turkey instead and brought my own container with me to the butcher counter at Whole Foods, where they didn't bat an eye when I handed it to them. And yes, this container is plastic Tupperware, which I already had. I'd like to find something made of stainless steel for buying meat but haven't gotten around to looking for an alternative.

So, this answers Meg's question on my March 7 post. She wrote, "Does this mean you're a vegetarian? It seems like you can't get meat anywhere without it being wrapped in plastic unless you get it from a butcher or shoot it yourself." And the answer is that while I eat far less meat than I used to, I still do eat some. And for those times, I take my own container to the meat counter.

But even if you live in a place without a Whole Foods or butcher shop, you can still get meat wrapped in butcher paper rather than Styrofoam and plastic. I inquired at Safeway a while back and was told that if customers come early enough, before the butchers leave for the day, they can request a specific cut of meat to be wrapped in paper. You'll have to call around to our local grocery stores and see what they'll do for you. The hardest part is getting up the nerve to ask. But once you get in the habit of doing it a few times, it's not so scary.

So I baked the Dinner In A Pumpkin, and we enjoyed it that night. And the next night, dealing with the never-ending kitty poo problems, I scooped the dinner out of the pumpkin for us and fed the cooked pumpkin to Soots and Arya (along with boiled chicken, steamed white rice, and probiotic powder.) And I'm happy to report that they are both much, much better.

We did end up having to give them more than this one pumpkin. And unfortunately, since we couldn't find anymore fresh pumpkins, we had to buy canned. I'm feeling a little sad about that right now because even though the canned pumpkin totally helped make them better in the short-term, I'm worried what the lining of the can, that one as well as the cans of cat food we feed them every day, are doing to them in the long term. Today, EWG's Enviroblog has a really terrific and comprehensive post about Bisphenol-A. You should read it. Turns out the dangers from BPA are higher in canned foods than in water bottles because of the high heat used to process canned foods. There is only one company, Eden Organic, which uses a non-BPA lining in some of their foods. But not all!

Maybe some day I'll start making the cats' food from scratch. But for now, I'm still learning to cook for people. And so here, finally, is my modified recipe for:

Dinner In A Pumpkin

INGREDIENTS:
1 medium pumpkin
1 pound ground turkey
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon brown sugar
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
1 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper
4 whole tomatoes and their juices
1 cup broth (Still using up Better Than Bouillon)
3 cups shredded cabbage
1 cup uncooked whole wheat couscous (original recipe calls for white rice.)

DIRECTIONS:
1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).
2. Wash pumpkin, cut off top, scrape out seeds.
3. Place ground turkey in a large, deep skillet. Crumble and cook over medium high heat until evenly brown. Drain fat, add onion and garlic; saute slightly.
4. Add sugar, Italian herbs, salt, pepper, tomatoes, broth, and couscous; mix thoroughly.
5. Layer inside of pumpkin with 1/3 of cabbage, and turkey and couscous mixture. Repeat layers, replace lid and bake for 2 to 3 hours.
6. To serve, scoop out the fleshy sides of the pumpkin along with the turkey/coucous/cabbage mixture.

The beauty of this recipe is that you can use pretty much any grain, vegetables, and meat or beans that you want.

Plastic in this recipe: plastic coating inside lid of Better Than Bouillon jar. Plastic Italian seasoning bottle, which will be replaced with bulk spice after it's used up. Zero plastic waste for last week.

The couscous, by the way, was Trader Joe's brand which comes in a plain cardboard box with no inside plastic bag. (Some boxes of couscous do have a plastic bag inside.) Normally, I buy couscous from a bulk bin with my own container, but I think the bulk store was sold out the week I wanted to buy it.

Have a nice weekend. I feel like I'm starting to come down with a cold. Need sleep. Need kitties not to jump on me and bite my face in the morning. It's like this cartoon. Turn your sound on and enjoy:


(If you're viewing this in an email or reader, click here to view the video.)
 

 

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?
 

 

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!
 

 

 

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.
 

 

Giving up the struggle: stories of ants and cats and hair products gone awry

I was planning to write about DIY hair care products this week. But so far, my experiments have been less than successful. Take, for example, the sugar water hairspray, exhibit left. Here's the recipe:

Dissolve 1 tablespoon sugar in a cup of water. Boil 3 minutes. Be sure the sugar is completely dissolved. Add 1 tablespoon vodka and 2-3 drops essential oil of your choice for scent. Pour into a spray bottle.

The instructions should also have said, "Keep out of the reach of ants!" But then, I guess the writer figured most sane people are aware that sugar attracts ants. Just to clarify, this hairspray ant invasion happened a month BEFORE last week's sugar incident. You'd think I would have learned. And you would be wrong.

So, about the hairspray. It didn't work anyway. Still looking for a plastic-free alternative. But that's not what I want to talk about in this post.

What I want to talk about is letting go of the struggle against reality, accepting things as they truly are, and finding ways to work with the world rather than against it. As I mentioned in my post about the ant invasion, constantly spraying them with vinegar was not working. I was in a never-ending battle with these creatures that was overwhelming and disheartening.

First of all, killing living beings every day is not fun. I'll admit there's a certain satisfaction in wiping them up and washing them down the drain. But it comes from a very dark place, the same as pouring salt on slugs and watching them sizzle or teasing tigers at the zoo. It doesn't make you a nice person. And an FPF reader, who also is one of Michael's co-workers and a Buddhist, was kind of horrified at the idea of mixing borax with sugar. Her reaction made me seriously reconsider anything lethal.

Second, the ants weren't actually invading me. They were trying to escape the rain. We know this because during normal dry weather, the ants disappear from my kitchen and stick to farming the scale on my potted citrus trees. (Ew!)

Third, the ants were in my cupboard and last month all over my hairspray because that's where the sugar was. Perhaps if the sugar were somewhere else...

So I did try the measure that I mentioned in my post: putting a cup of sugar in the cabinet under the sink to attract them away from my countertops and food cupboards. And guess what. It's working! The ants are all over the sugar under the sink (where I can't see them and they can't hurt anything) and almost completely gone from everywhere else. I guess once the rains have stopped for good, I'll start moving the sugar towards the back door and try to lead them back outside. Or maybe they'll just go on their own. We'll see.

Humans have different ways of describing the experience of living with reality rather than the fantasy of life as you wish it were. Going with the flow. Following the tao. Byron Katie, author of one of my favorite books, calls it Loving What Is.

"Loving what is" doesn't mean that when we see injustice or harm occurring in the world we sit passively by and do nothing. What it does mean is that we can work with things as they actually are rather than how we think they ought to be. Instead of thinking, "These ants should not be on my countertop!" I can say, "These ants should be on my countertop because that is what ants do when it rains outside and they have no other source of food. So I'll put some food for them down below and leave my countertops free for my own food." Or some other solution that recognizes the nature of ants rather than the idea of how we wish ants behaved.

Okay, so I learned this lesson a second time this week with my kitties. They are not allowed into our bedroom at night because they chase and bite and wrestle on top of our heads. (Why it is necessary for the wrestling to happen on our heads, we do not know.) So every morning, there are kitties outside the bedroom door scratching and mewing and oh so excited for us to come out and be with them, or at least give them food. And every morning, when I open the door, these kitties rush past me into the room and under the bed, where I spend many minutes trying to coax them out.

Why are they coming into the bedroom? Don't they know I'm leaving the bedroom? Don't they know the food is in the kitchen? Are they stupid? These are the kinds of grumblings that were running through me each morning. Until finally, I realized that I was expecting my kittens to think like people instead of kittens. So instead of trying to coax them out of the bedroom, I simply left them in there, closed the door, and walked away. It only took about 5 seconds before they were scratching on the door to be let out. And zero frustration for me.

So what does this have to do with plastic and environmental issues? Here's the thing. Plastic exists. People use it. People throw it away. It harms animals. It's also extremely convenient and useful. It is reality and no amount of wishful thinking will change that. If we're going to create a world without harm, we somehow have to work with reality the way it is and go from there, rather than grumbling and mumbling and getting angry with people who don't agree with us.

What does that mean? I don't know. I'm trying to figure it out. I do suspect that fighting doesn't work and that there's no winning "the war against plastic" any more than "the war against drugs" or "the war against terrorism." There's only seeing the world as it actually is, working with reality, and creating change from the inside out, starting with ourselves.

It's as my meditation teacher said at the last retreat pointing to his noggin, "The real garbage is in here." Perhaps once we realize that, the rest will come easily.