Archive for May, 2011

Guilt and a Green Conscience

A week or so ago, I asked you to leave a comment about one thing you feel guilty about — an ecoconfession — to enter a surprise giveaway. The prize is a copy of Franke James’s illustrated book, Bothered by My Green Conscience: How an SUV-driving, imported-strawberry-eating urban dweller can go green. But I asked [...]

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Irritated with Plastic Berry Containers? Give Them Back.

How do you buy berries and cherry tomatoes without plastic? Most small fruits come in those green plastic mesh baskets or increasingly in clear plastic clamshells. If you shop your local farmers market, it’s not a problem. The farmers want their containers back! Save Plastic, Help a Farmer This weekend, at my local Temescal Farmers [...]

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Reusable cotton rounds beat cotton balls in plastic or paper packaging.

Cotton balls come packaged in plastic. So do cotton facial rounds. And even organic cotton balls come in plastic. So I’d pretty much given up using either of them after my last bag ran out a few years ago. And then, in March, I discovered cotton balls in a cardboard box at CVS. I checked [...]

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Eco-Friendly Toothbrush Review

What toothbrush would you choose? Recycled plastic in returnable packaging or natural wood packaged in plastic? Nylon bristles or natural pig hair? Or how about a stick that you chew on? I’ve been researching toothbrush alternatives and found that they all have pros and cons. How you brush your teeth will depend on your environmental [...]

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Winners, Answers, Discount, and New Weekend Giveaway

So many giveaways. So many winners. There’s one more quick weekend giveaway at the bottom of this post, and an announcement for next week. Winner of Reflect Klean Kanteen from Greenfeet The winner of the Reflect plastic-free bamboo-topped stainless steel Klean Kanteen water bottle from Greenfeet is Kacie Scanlon. She posted a photo of herself [...]

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Gardening Without Plastic, Part 1: Raised Beds and Plastic-Free Soil

Last Fall, Rodale.com’s Dana Blinder forwarded me a cool article: Keep Your Garden Plastic-Free with These Easy Swaps. Knowing that I write the blog My Plastic-free Life, she thought the topic of gardening with less plastic might be interesting to me and my readers. What she didn’t know was that I had already failed miserably [...]

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January – April 2011 Plastic Waste Tally

15.4 oz Plastic Waste [11.9 oz new/3.5 oz acquired prior to June 2007] Someone commented a while back that my plastic trash tallies were getting boring because there was so little each month and it all looked the same. After 3-1/2 years of collecting plastic, I was kind of getting bored too. So, here’s 4 [...]

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Save Plastic. Don’t Break Your Laptop Monitor.

What is an LCD monitor made of? And what do you do if it breaks? I learned the answers to these questions the hard way. The Stupid Thing I Did Laptop monitors break easily, as I discovered a couple of months ago after closing the lid down on a couple of earbuds I had left [...]

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