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.
 

Comments

Comments

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

Anita on Mon, 27th Oct 2008 1:30 pm


Hi Beth-
I spoke with my city’s recycling office on Friday and they pointed me to this for plastic caps:

http://aveda.aveda.com/aboutaveda/caps.asp

What do you think?

Fake Plastic Fish on Mon, 27th Oct 2008 1:36 pm


Hi Anita. I’ve been trying to get more info from Aveda about this program, and in fact I took a bag of caps I’d found on the street to their store on 4th Street in Berkeley, but so far no one has gotten back to me with answers. Don’t know why and don’t want to endorse the program until I find out exactly what happens to all the caps. Not sure all of them get recycled into Aveda bottles.

Anonymous on Thu, 30th Oct 2008 6:25 am


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.

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