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Our oceans are filling up with plastic: plastic that harms wildlife and never biodegrades; plastic that enters the food chain and leaches toxic chemicals. This blog is a record of my journey to live with as little unnecessary plastic as possible. Won't you join me? Fake plastic fish may be cute, but if we keep filling up our oceans with plastic, they could be the only kind we have left.... |
Week 27 Results: 4.4 oz of plastic, kitties not included.
Kitties are here! So is the weekly tally and the start of the holiday plastic. More next week, but hopefully not too much more.
Non-recyclable items used this week but purchased before the plastic project began:
- 3 hunks of packing tape from broken down boxes. Cleaning up for the kitties, I’ve been consolidating the contents of and recycling cardboard boxes.
- 1 piece of plastic wrap found in a box while organizing shelves.
- 1 air pillow also found in a box.
So that’s all the old stuff. Now for the new plastic waste.
- 4 Refresh Endura single-use eye drop containers (#4 plastic).
- 1 plastic wrapper from a packet of 50 AMC movie tickets I bought as gifts for family members. I really thought the tickets would be completely plastic-free (aside from the fact that the movies themselves are basically plastic, a subject I covered in my Nov 28 post.)
- 1 bit of plastic from a bunch of organic fair-trade bananas.
- 1 piece of tape from a package of custom cloth pantiliners.
- Scotch tape from a couple of presents from work. These are the presents I opened and rewrapped without tape on Monday.
- 1 plastic catnip baggie from a Cosmic Catnip cardboard scratcher. I’ll post more about the supplies we’ve purchased/ obtained for our kitties and how we are minimizing the new plastic as much as possible.
- 1 bright red piece of plastic gift wrap and a Christmas ziplock bag. A gift from a co-worker: homemade pumpkin bread wrapped in foil, inside a holiday-pattern plastic bag, inside a big piece of red plastic. And here’s my question: how do I reuse the plastic wrapping without giving people the idea that I’m pro-plastic? And should I even pass this along to someone else or just add it to my plastic purgatory?
And finally, 1 recycled plastic container of Vermont Natural Coatings PolyWhey furniture finish (#5 plastic). I wrote about this one on Wednesday. The container is 100% recycled polypropylene except for the metal rim, which I had to cut off with a saw and metal cutters, in order to recycle the plastic. Containers made from mixed materials are not recyclable unless you can separate the components. Without the metal rim, I’m hoping the plastic container will be accepted by San Francisco’s program. At least, it was not made from new plastic.
So that’s the plastic for this week.
More kitten photos and posts about our efforts to be low-plastic pet owners coming soon. But I’m assuming many of you won’t be doing as much blog or e-mail reading in the next few days. If you are reading this now, please take the following short poll so I can figure out whether I should continue to blog regularly this week or wait a few days.
Oh, and by the way, the kitties love Tina just a little too much!
Comments
Comments
11 Comments on Week 27 Results: 4.4 oz of plastic, kitties not included.
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Anonymous on
Sun, 23rd Dec 2007 11:28 pm
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Anonymous on
Sun, 23rd Dec 2007 11:54 pm
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heather t on
Mon, 24th Dec 2007 8:25 am
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Village Green on
Mon, 24th Dec 2007 8:33 am
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OrneryPest on
Wed, 26th Dec 2007 4:15 am
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Rosa on
Wed, 26th Dec 2007 7:55 am
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Tanya on
Wed, 26th Dec 2007 1:34 pm
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SustainableStyle on
Wed, 26th Dec 2007 7:54 pm
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homeschoolmom on
Wed, 26th Dec 2007 8:06 pm
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Rosa on
Thu, 27th Dec 2007 9:27 am
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LifeLessPlastic on
Thu, 3rd Jan 2008 10:55 pm
You’re probably still figuring out what works best for your kitties (who look just like my little alley cats when I first adopted them) and your household, but I wanted to put in a good word for Feline Pine kitty litter or the generics (which do, sadly, come in a giant plastic bag). I loved the idea of the Swheat Scoop wheat one, and it worked fairly well, but it was very expensive, the cats didn’t really like it, and we found hard little hunks of wheat litter everywhere. We never could find the corn-based one, but the pine-based litters have been fantastic for us–the house is much cleaner, we can use the old stuff as mulch (if the snow ever melts), and the cats are happy (and don’t smell like the horrible dust from the clay litters).
Stop! Don’t recycle those cardboard boxes yet! Cats & kittens love boxes.
Has your new life of utter happiness started yet, now that the kittens have arrived?
There’s also a cat litter made from recycled newspapers called Yesterday’s News. If you have a girl kitty and have her spayed, you will probably have to use this anyway while she recovers.
Anyhoo… I plan to read your blog whenever I feel like it (gosh!), but feel free to, ya know, take a day off now and then. :)
And tell us about the kitties!!
Just brought home a new kitten last night. I too like the pine litter for cats, also Cedariffic, which smells good and is very light to carry home or have shipped to you.
Finding healthy cat food in recyclable containers is a huge challenge. I’ll be interested to hear about your choices.
As for catnip, I grow it every summer and dry it for the winter months. No plastic!
And here I sit, trying to get my family down below 30 pounds of plastic waste a week.
Swheat Stuff comes in paper bags but they’re shiny so I assume they’re plastic-coated.
Adorable kitties!
Congratulations on the new kittens! They are super cute! :) I’ve never been a cat owner so I’m not claiming to be an expert by any means but one of my friends used dirt for her litter box. Yep, just plain old dirt… Granted, they lived on a farm so this may or may not be a practical suggestion for a city dweller. :) Plus even dirt comes in plastic bags nowdays.
I’m loving the kitty pictres!
Really loving the cat pictures! We’re using Swheat (sp?) Scoop litter right now and get it at Target in a recyclable cardboard box container. I like it *but* it flies everywhere. Tried the Feline Pine Scoop (it smells nice and pine-y) but it messes up the auto-litterbox (yeah, not getting rid of this until it dies…silly, energy-wasting, plastic-filled device that came with our cat). Please post your litterbox filler finds if you can; I’m always looking for the trifecta of poop products (cat healthy, planet loving, non-stinky).
I will say, I think Swheat Scoop is the right choice for us for some reasons that may not apply to Beth.
1) it’s made here in the Midwest, out of wheat grown in the Midwest
2) we can stockpile bags in our garage right now and they will freeze and kill off Asian Meal Moth eggs (well, not today, it’s up above 20 degrees. But we’ll have a few weeks of below zero soon.)
3) we have composted it in the past and may be able to find a place to compost it this summer again, because we have a big yard and friends who farm with animals.
Awesome lol cat! :)
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