I make body and baby products, and I struggle with packaging. http://www.anarreshealth.ca/node/41
My manufacturer/distributor doesn't seem to have other customers who care – I am always positioning my self as an eco freak for complaining about waste and asking pesky questions. Since Free Trade and the economic down turn have killed off all four glass manufacturers in southern Ontario, I am left with my distributor's Chinese outsourced packaging and powerlessness over how much plastic sneaks in.

Glass jars and bottles come only with plastic lids. Most of the time, I am able to select bakelite for jars instead of composite and metal trimmed mystery plastic. http://www.anarreshealth.ca/node/216 Bakelite is a fairly simple resin without plasticizers (endocrine disruptors). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakelite It's basically kinda like a rock when thrown out. It has a foam liner that is obviously planet-hostile. Sometimes I luck out and my shipment comes only in a divided carboard box. Sometimes, every lid is in its own plastic baggie. I reuse the boxes and bags, but it pisses me off. It comes from the factory that way to preserve the sterilization. Nothing I can do about it, it seems.

Bottles are a bigger quandry. There are only a few sizes that come with bakelite caps. Most caps are HDPE type mystery caps. I avoid composite caps. Pump bottles are all mystery plastic. The best I can do is reuse these, refill them and take them back from customers, who get a $2-$3 discount.

I always list the cost of the packaging on my receipts so clients understand, and see the benefit of reusing and returning bottles.

Many of my bottles are donated to me, so I can pass them on to clients with tighter budgets after I clean them with soap water and sterilize with high proof grain alcohol – never isolpropyl alcohol!

Metal containers carry their own grief for manufacturers like me. http://www.anarreshealth.ca/node/328

I ordered 2 corrugated cardboard cases of stainless steel canisters and to my horror, they arrived individually stapled shut in plastic bags! With the high cost, high embodied energy, and use limited to ointments, salves and relatively solid food storage, I am not able to package most of my stuff in these.

My guiltiest bottle is also simultaneously my greatest anti-plastic triumph. http://www.anarreshealth.ca/node/213 Alice bottles are 99%+ recycled aluminum, so they're lightweight, opaque, unbreakable, preserve essential oils and keep products cool. While you never want to cook with aluminum, essential oils and other botanicals are safest and best kept in aluminum. Even stainless steel degrades with some essential oils.

But my darling Alice bottles come in the promising double walled corrugated cardboard boxes ALSO INDIVIDUALLY WRAPPED IN PLASTIC! And their pumps, the only ones that work for lotions and thicker things, are of mystery plastic with metal springs! I do reuse the bags to package my 100g DIY supplies, but ARRRGH it's frustrating.

So my advice to keep your family out of the plastic loop is to:
1. Make your own as much as possible.
2. Find local stores and makers who will refill, reuse or sell to you in bulk.
3. Choose glass and metal over plastic, and bakelite or metal where possible.

Love & RRRevolution, Tracey

First there's the nappy thing. I used cloth with my first for a while, but the sleeplessness got to me. Switched to disposables, and wish I never had.

Because now I realise disposables are a sucker's game – I'm STILL paying for them for two kids each week, nearly 5 years on from having my son! Yowch! Work that out in dollars and you're probably in the tens of thousands – they never tell you the truth about how much you'll spend on disposables on the cute Huggies ads.

Nor do they tell you that ids in disposables usually train later, often as much as a year and a half later, on average. True.

Apart from that, though, we're pretty good. No plastic wrap in the house – did you know that most families use more plastic in wrap than in bags each year? Actually, you probably did!

My son's lunches are in a re-usable lunchbox (plastic, I'm afraid), but we buy his snackies in bulk (things like nuts, dried fruit etc.) and put them into little tubs each day. Saves hugely on costs and packaging.

For a family of four, through conscious choices we've got our rubbish down by half, and I hope, once the kids are finally out of nappies, to get it down to practically nothing (boy I really regret going to disposables! I'm going to do a post on it!).

But toys? Yep, most of them are plastic. That's just life. Until Fisher Price etc start making toys from wood and metal again, like they did a few decades ago, there's not a whole bunch I can do about it. You can find wood toys for really young kids, but wood Lightining McQueens and My Little Ponies? I'm still looking!

Maureen, I was a vegetarian for 2 years 17 years ago, when I gave up meat after eating too many hotdogs & hamburgers on 4th of July and felt gross and started thinking about factory farming and researching how my meat was "made". I was 23. I got really skinny, felt weak and looked ill. I didn't know how to eat a balanced vegetarian diet back then. But, philosophically I could not go back to eating mammals. So I added poultry and fish back into my diet and felt much better. For the last 12 years I have only eaten organic poultry and some fish. I only choose fish from the Seafood Watch list so I am sure not to endanger the kind that are being over-fished. I eat only organic chicken and choose veggie or fish dishes when I go out to eat – which isn't that often with a 2 year old. When we buy a house I want to raise some chickens for eggs. My family had them when we were kids.

I worked in the nutrition industry for several years and know that it is difficult to get B12 from a strict vegetarian diet. I am not contributing to factory farming and feel good about my choices. My son eats as I do until he is old enough to decide for himself how he would like to eat. I am not a fan of soy – the food of choice of vegetarians. It is not processed well by the body. The high phytates inhibit iron absorption and it is a phyto-estrogen! Only fermented soy should be consumed – IMO. Not to mention that soy is the #1 GMO food in the country! If you want to talk being good to the environment let's talk about supporting GMO soy!

My very 1st post on my blog is about breast feeding and cow's milk.
http://www.puremothers.com/?p=3
I never introduced my son to cow's milk for calcium. I am still nursing at 2 (almost weaned) to rice milk and hemp milk. He gets calcium from broccoli and yogurt and some cheese. Organic, of course. I grew up on these. I see nothing wrong with this when from small organic dairy farms where cow's are treated well. I agree we can get calcium from other sources though. But a 2 year old won't eat enough sesame seeds to make 800mg's each day. If you see my post you'll read how much it takes to make up that amount.

Again, we all do the best we can to make the changes that work for each family. I have cut way down on disposable diapers and I use cotton training pants throughout the day. My child wears about 2 disposable each day now (for naps and night). gdiapers just came out with a cloth insert! I wish they had that earlier. I loved the covers but the inserts were so scratchy!

Like, Rob, I struggle with pet items too. I am spending more $ on the box of pine litter instead of getting the cost efficient larger plastic bag. But, 1 of my cats is very ill (possible intestinal cancer) and will only eat a hypoallergenic food that comes in a plastic bag. His life is important to me, so I buy it.

I never professed to be perfect. None of us are. We all do the best we can and hopefully inspire each other to make a new change we didn't know we could before by sharing our stories with each other.

Thanks Beth for an awesome blog!

I do think some re-engineering on the cloth diapers we used (poo pockets pattern, sewn by my baby's grandma) would have helped the walking thing – but I wasn't the seamstress and her son wasn't willing to make requests when she was giving us gifts, so.

I use eggs and cheese mostly to be able to eat vegetables in a tastier way and in a wider variety of recipes, and to replace meat. I think it's better for the environment, for my health, for my karma and for my feelings too, since I'd feel guilty if I ate meat again. I do feel guilty about dairies and eggs too, but I do the best I can. Maybe in a few years I'll have the time and the willpower to learn to live without them or limit my consumption of them even more.

The point of this is: do the best you can, and keep in mind the environmental problems caused by the meat and dairy industries (as explained in TheMeatrix.com).

Anyways, I posted a lot of cloth diapering info and links if anyone is interested.
http://home.comcast.net/~matandemilymitchell/site/?/blog/&PHPSESSID=365c6c1d73456653fd715fdc40c753ff

We had the exact same problem with cloth diapers, btw- my kid is really skinny and as soon as he was walking he HATED the cloth diaper between his legs. So we did cloth for about a year and a half and then started potty training and used disposable pullups. Plus the diapers were a gift from a sewing grandma and half of them were …plastic. That synthetic fuzzy fabric is just another plastic. Of course we used them about 5,000 times, but still.