I’ve gone commercial!  Well, no I didn’t. But I did make a commercial. Okay, not exactly. Filmmaker Alec Bernal, who created last month’s Lunchbox Project video, just finished making me an awesome YouTube video promo for my book Plastic-Free. All I did was show up… and bring along the plastic sea monster.  Check out the transformation… [...]

Recently, several readers, including my dad, have forwarded me articles about a group of Yale students who discovered an Amazonian fungus (pestalotiopsis microspora) that can not only eat polyurethane plastic, but can actually survive on it as its sole source of carbon. Could a fungus be the solution to our plastic pollution problem? And what [...]

I am so full of excitement right now I could burst.  I just received the first case of my new book:  Plastic-Free: How I Kicked the Plastic Habit and How You Can Too, and I feel like a proud mama right now.  A few nights ago, I had a dream that the book arrived and [...]

Most chewing gum is made from plastic.  Don’t believe me?  Read the details in my 2010 post “Chewing on Plastic? Yum.”  Even “natural” chewing gums like Glee, which is made with natural chicle, also contain plastic.  And the few brands that seem not to contain plastic often come packaged in a plastic bottle or plastic [...]

It’s been all over the news for the past two days:  Six Oregon girls, travelling to an out of town soccer tournament in Seattle, all got sick with norovirus after passing around cookies in a reusable bag.  Scientists from the Oregon Public Health department did some sleuthing and traced the virus to the reusable bag. [...]

I’m back from my meditation retreat, where one of the common admonishments is “Don’t push the river.”  What does that mean?  To me, it’s about being in the flow and not exerting more effort than necessary to live peacefully and mindfully in the present moment.  After all, the river’s gonna flow whether you push it [...]

Sarah Schmiechen is a long-time reader of this blog and prior participant in the Show Your Plastic Trash Challenge.  She emailed me recently to let me know about some of the successes and challenges she’s had in reducing her plastic consumption, and she suggested that it might be useful/helpful for me to post profiles of [...]

Would you believe there is a company not only producing plastic products for the beach, but actually promoting them using a photo of an ocean wave sweeping one of their plastic gizmos, filled with a disposable plastic cup, towards the sea? I wasn’t planning on posting a rant today, as I’m leaving in a few [...]

“My belief is that there’s enough material in existence in the world that we could probably freeze all new production effective immediately and just get more creative with what’s already out there.” –Josh Title, owner of the Cate & Levi Collection toy company. When I heard Josh say those words in his video about his [...]

What does the Trayvon Martin murder have to do with sea turtles choking on plastic bags or the toxicity of bisphenol-A?  At first glance, not a whole lot.  And it’s not the kind of  news I would normally write about on My Plastic-Free Life.  But listening to the April 17 episode of the American Public [...]