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 embarrassingly 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 ^[1]. 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 ^[2] 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.