Goodbye old friends. You served me well. But did you poison me in the process? I don’t know. Supposedly #5 polypropylene is safe. But that’s what they used to say about your buddy polycarbonate, and look what he’s doing to us! So you have to go. White coffee drip cone, black coffee drip cone, and Braun electric coffee maker with the plastic coffee cone, goodbye. And you, new Melitta coffee filters in the plastic bag, you have to go too. Hope you will all enjoy being with the brave Freecycler who has agreed to take you home, despite the warning in my Freecycle post that I was getting rid of you because I wasn’t sure it was safe to drink hot liquids poured through plastic.

So hello new coffee friends. It’s a good thing I bought you last week before Crunchy Chicken’s Buy Nothing Challenge began on April 1. Too bad you came with a plastic bag of bleached white coffee filters, which the above-mentioned Freecycler is going to enjoy. But considering that you are all porcelain, come in a cardboard box with only a tiny bit of cardboard inside and no plastic packaging, and will last me for many, many years if I’m careful, it’s a small price to pay. (Maybe I should send the filters back to Melitta with a note, but at the moment, I have too many other things going on.)

You’re nice because I can set your coffee cone directly on my travel mug for making coffee for myself in the morning. Or I can use the porcelain 6-cup pitcher and make coffee for friends as well. I still have half a box of unbleached #2 filters (smaller than this #4 cone, but still workable.) But when they are gone, it would be nice to get some reusable coffee filters. And not the gold/stainless mesh ones because they still have plastic in and around them. How about it organicneedle? Are you up for sewing organic cotton or hemp coffee filters that don’t come in a plastic bag? (I’ve only seen reusable cloth filters in plastic bags. If anyone knows of filters that come sans bag or at least in paper or cardboard, please let me know.)

The other nice thing about you is that you came from Greenfeet, an environmentally conscious online retailer that packaged you 100% plastic-free. They even used paper tape on the box instead of plastic! That is rare these days, indeed. And when I emailed them to find out about their packaging policies ahead of time, this is what customer service rep, Jessica, wrote:

At Greenfeet, we do not purchase new plastic or styrofoam packaging. If anyone ever receives styrofoam or plastic packaging, it is packaging that we are reusing. Though typically, we try not to use those materials at all. If the merchandise ships out from one of our manufacturers, there may be plastic or styrofoam packaging in there. However since most items ship from our facility at Greenfeet, we try not to use those packing materials.

See? The box was full of paper and a little bonus surprise…

This photo is dedicated to homeschoolmom’s almost 13yo son, who likes it when the kitties come out to play. The packing paper is still all over our living room floor. Yes, I know it would be better to gather it all up and save it to be reused. But Soots and Arya are enjoying it so much, I just can’t take it away from them!

Tomorrow, I’ll have a post about the milk that goes in the coffee. And another dairy product. I said I was going to slow down on posting, didn’t I? Not this week, I guess. I seem to have all this extra energy. Could it be because of Madonna???

I April Fooled my co-workers today telling them that “Oh my god! You will not believe this! Madonna read my blog and called me this morning! She did! Well, her rep did, but then she herself got on the phone after I picked up. Really. She says she’s banning plastic from all of her tours from now on just because of Fake Plastic Fish!” It’s a nice thought. Tomorrow I have to confess I made it up, right?

But that’s not why I’m in such a good mood. My energy level is being artificially boosted by repeat playings of the Madonna/Justin Timberlake/Timbaland single, 4 minutes, on my iPod, which has me dancing Ellen Degeneres-style at the BART station in the morning exactly 4 minutes at a time over and over and over again. Sometimes being a little obsessive is a fun thing!