A Low-Waste Noel

It being Christmas, we had to have cookies, and their being cookies, they had to be chocolate chip. But chips come in a plastic bag! So this week found me on the kitchen floor with a hammer, smashing a one-pound bar of Trader Joe's 71% dark chocolate into bit-sized chunks. They made very toothsome treats.

The season has brought other quiet pleasures as well. We set the alarm and got up at midnight to watch the lunar eclipse the other night, but because we live in Portland, our plans were foiled by cloud cover, so we went back to bed and enjoyed the eclipse on Youtube the next morning.

Later that day, at precisely 3:38 p.m., we went out (teeth chattering) to the back yard and lit a tiny fire in our Mexican chimenea to observe the winter solstice. We stood out there just long enough to listen to the appropriate segment of Vivaldi's Four Seasons on my cell phone.


And I've been repurposing items from the recycling bin, making tree ornaments from spaghetti jar lids (they make nice round metal picture frames) and old cardboard and magazines and popsicle sticks and aluminum pot pie pans. Our tree is newly graced with images of Piglet, Pooh and Tigger; Olympic shot putter Michelle Carter; biologist E.O. Wilson (my hero); and Lady Gaga.

Mauled by Malls

Last week we traveled to Tucson to check in on after Rick's mother, who is 91. Margaret is a dear soul for whom we would do anything. Anything, in this case, included leaving our political values at the shore and wading neck-deep into Retail America.

Tucson's city center is a place of considerable charm, with historic architecture, small businesses and a well-developed community of creatives. Out beyond the downtown core, however, are miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles and miles of indistinguishable strip malls, which we crisscrossed again and again as we searched for watch batteries, large print books, sun visors. We put 600 miles on our rental car and never left town, doing our part to warm the planet and generating our own little mountain of trash at chain restaurants as we went.

The westering sun on the mountains, the saguaro cacti marching up the hillside, the jack rabbits and javelinas at our campground were an insufficient antidote to the driving and driving and driving and driving and driving and the low-slung box stores stretching to the horizon and the open canals that carry water through the desert from the Colorado.

The sheer acreage of the sprawl, and the fact that most of it is dedicated to consumption, left us cranky and  homesick. Among the rotating Christmas trees and bobbing mechanical Santas, under the worst holiday hits ever recorded (hand-selected to be piped into every shopping center), I wanted to shake outer Tucson by the shoulders and cry THIS IS NOT CHRISTMAS. This is a horrible, joyless simulacrum of Christmas from which all inner peace has been siphoned out. This is acre upon acre upon hundreds of acres of pointlessness, each component of which has its own tiny zip-lock baggie, packed together with others in a plastic box and stuffed into a plastic shopping bag for its short trip from the mall to the landfill.

This may just be apocalyptic thinking brought on by nausea and crushing boredom, but on the other hand I could be right: in a hundred years, I think, there will be no Tucson as we know it. There simply will not be enough water and energy to maintain this grotesqueness. These endless miles of shopping opportunities will become a vast and trashy ghost town. And in a thousand years, what was once a 195-square-mile metropolis will be the site of an archaelogical dig, revealing layer upon fascinating layer of a strange and incomprehensible ancient culture.

Bad News, Good News

The Experiment is humming along, so well that I worry about running out of things to write about. Within the parameters, it’s been surprisingly easy to eliminate plastic from our lives.  And without the parameters, it would be impossible.

I’ve flown out of state twice since my plastically-disastrous trip to Key West in October, and fared no better on either excursion. And here at home Rick and I had a plumbing problem that required going down to the crawl space under the house with a flashlight. A flashlight needs batteries, which aren’t sold in bulk; what were we to do, carry a torch to the cellar? (To his credit, Rick sought out and found minimally-packaged batteries, shrink-wrapped in sets of eight). Also, I spent my November freebie on a netbook – an extravagant use of a freebie, I think – because of a perceived (mainly professional)  need to be connected to the internet and have access to word-processing while traveling in and out of town. 

I think this may prove to be the main insight of the year’s experience: it is easy to reduce, but nearly impossible to eliminate, our modern dependence on plastic. To do so would require extreme effort, some measure of deprivation  and a monumental change in the way we go about being alive and human.  It would not present an imitable model, and we’d probably make ourselves obnoxious to our friends.

That said, we are finding daily life not much changed. We are not inconvenienced by our new regimen. However clear our dependence is, it’s also obvious to us that our society goes through much, much, much more plastic than is necessary, and it’s this wantonness that bothers us.  I might need prescription meds that come in plastic vials, but I don’t need a sword-shaped plastic stir stick in my black tea.  I might even need a netbook, but I don’t need a plastic bag to tote it home in (actually I was impressed by its minimalist packaging, mostly cardboard with a small plastic handle for carrying. You go, Asus.)

We’re not zealots – just committed, if slightly eccentric, people trying to draw attention to a mounting problem that we think could be at least mitigated with a little mindfulness.

A Close Shave

It's all about line-drawing, this business, and one place we've drawn a line is at shaving cream. It's available, of course, only in cans with plastic caps. Granted the can is metal, and it lasts a long time -- but still, if we were truly pure of heart, we would stop shaving altogether. But Rick feels scruffy in a beard. And I'm very uncomfortable with hairy legs and armpits. There's a good deal of demographic overlap between women committed to waste reduction and women who don't shave. I live among a people who tend to regard shaving as anti-feminist, unnatural and silly. Not I. Unshaven, I feel like a great stinking ape, especially in ballet class.

Research reveals that there is a whole community of "wet shavers" who use a boar-bristle brush and a special soap in a special bowl to work up a lather for shaving, like in cowboy movies. Who knew? But those brush handles are probably made of plastic (unless you get a high-end porcelain one. Does one really need a high-end shaving brush?) I also have concerns about taking bristles from boars. Not to mention the time and space commitment involved.

We could be truer to our cause, and live in solidarity with the homeless, the women's movement, and the endangered boars. Instead, we draw a line.

Sweet Tooth

In support of The Experiment, our friend Pam gave us several jars of homemade apple butter, and my parents came home from a trip with homemade jam for us in assorted Southwestern flavors like choke cherry and jalapeño. Jam has been a sticking point, as it were, because most commercial jars of sweet spreadables, though glass, come with a plastic seal around their necks. And because Rick has a considerable appetite for the stuff. A bagel is really just a way to get jam from the jar to his mouth.

Rick's other source of suffering is cookielessness. Cookies, a staple, invariably come in plastic packaging of some kind, unless you get them from a bakery. But at a buck or more a pop, bakery cookies could not satisfy Rick's hunger. At his rate of consumption, he'd have to choose between cookies and health insurance. 

His lovely wife actually made cookies at home last week, and they were darned good, too. But that might have been a fluke. Rick has hit on a brilliant solution. He's compiled a list of all the commercial venues in town he frequents -- the woodworking supply store, the credit union, the vet -- that leave out plates of cookies for their customers. He can address his appetites when he's out running errands. He will not suffer from insufficient Vitamin C, or Vitamin J, either.

Keeping it on the Merry-Go-Round

Of course we have always recycled. Both Rick and I are decades-old recyclers who've been gathering and sorting and storing and carting off bags of miscellany since long before curbside was invented, since long before recycling was de rigueur. More recently, for a short, sweet time, we were squirreling away goodies for a local company that took all the plastics not recyclable anywhere else in town, the cereal box liners and the styrofoam cups and the sad old toys. That company would hold an event three times a year in a church parking lot, and swarms of plastics hoarders -- our people! -- would show up with bags and bags and bags of weird shit they'd been keeping in their laundry rooms for the occasion. Then the economy crashed, the bottom fell out of the plastics market, and there is no tri-annual Plastics Round-Up any more. We've still got a stash by the freezer; we're hanging onto it with a kind of messianic hope.

Still, for all that deeply observant recycling, there were always things we had to put in the trash, things that no one, not even the Plastics Round-Up people, could take. Vinyl, for one. And misceginations of plastic and metal that couldn't be pried apart. So I am happy to report that The Experiment is reducing the number of those deadbeats under our roof. I can't be scientific about it, because we aren't (unlike an even more observant anti-plastic blogger we know) cataloging all the synthetic polymers that darken our doorway. But we're generating less that is landfill-bound than before The Experiment started. For at least a year, our household has been producing about three-quarters of a (standard 32-gallon) can of garbage each month. Last week when I went to put the garbage out, it being the first of the month, I discovered we'd only filled up half the can. Safe to assume at least some of that volume can be accounted for by yucky plastics no longer passing through our hands.

Don't be too impressed. We know people who produce just one can of garbage a year.

A Retraction

I was confused! Don't start sending old toothpaste tubes to Tom's of Maine!


I don't know where I got the idea that Rick was mailing his empty tubes to the East Coast. I might have gotten them mixed up with Preserve brand toothbrushes, which come from the store in a pre-addressed package that you use to mail the old toothbrush to the company for recycling when you're done with it. Rick just takes the old Tom's tubes to our local recycle center. He chooses Tom's because the tubes are metal rather than plastic. This is what the Tom's of Maine website says about its toothpaste tubes:


Tubes: Recyclable aluminum
Cap: Polypropylene #5
Threading: LDPE #4
Box: Recycled/Recyclable paperboard -- 40-65% post consumer
Insert: Recycled/Recyclable paper -- 100% post consumer

Tom's contributes to all sorts of good causes, manufactures and packages its products as responsibly as it can, and treats its employees well. So it's a good toothpaste choice for a variety of reasons. We have some concerns about aluminum, which we've eliminated from our kitchen because of research linking it to Alzheimer's. But this is what we're doing at the moment -- at least for one toothpaste tube's worth of time.

The Tyranny of Toothpaste, and Toilet Paper Redux

Our post on toilet paper attracted so much attention I thought I'd better address some of the points raised. Yes, we wash the diapers in hot water -- the only items in our household to get such laundry treatment. No, we don't cut them into to smaller sizes. We tried that, but the inner fibers unraveled in the wash and came out a tangled mess. We also discovered that the thickest diapers are actually too thick to be -- how shall I say this? -- sufficiently pliable. Thin diapers are better. No, we're not sure the environmental trade-off (plastic generation vs. water usage) is worth it (we're not trying to save the whole world -- not this year, anyway). And the ew factor is really nothing, guys. At the risk of over-sharing, I have to say that the nice soft cloth is rather an improvement over paper...

Pre-industrial ass-wiping doesn't bother me a bit. On the other hand, modern dentistry has, I believe, improved the quality of human life a great deal in the last half-century, and I'm not inclined to mess with it. We've been fretting from the start about toothpaste tubes. Rick found some recipes for homemade toothpaste on line, but further research cast doubt on its efficacy. Here's our compromise: Tom's of Maine brand toothpaste will take its used tubes back and recycle them. Rick's been sending his empty tubes back for years, so I am joining him in becoming a Tom's loyalist. The toothpaste is a little more expensive than Crest, but how much toothpaste do you go through in a year? And should I raise a complaint about Wintermint, the  only flavor they make their toothpaste-for-sensitive-teeth in, Rick is likely to respond: "Yeah. They don't have these problems in Darfur."

That's How We Roll

We have hit on a solution to the problem of toilet paper that will don't imagine will attract many imitators. The problem of toilet paper being that the 6- and 12- and 24-packs come encased in plastic. We could, of course, buy rolls singly, wrapped in paper. But that's hard on the wallet.

So we've opted instead for diapers.

A local diaper service sells clean, second-hand diapers by the dozen for use as rags. We bought a stack and are keeping them in a basket by the potty. After use, they go into a lidded stainless-steel garbage pail, and from there to the wash.

I hear readers now going, "Eeeewwww..." We are a squeamish people, we Americans. We want our caca to disappear on sight. But really, this new system is no weirder than using cloth diapers with a baby. It's a lot less grody than cleaning a cat box. It's cheap, it frees up space in the linen closet, and it produces no plastic waste.

And we get bonus points for saving trees.

Something of a Disaster

I've just returned from a conference in Key West, and have many Hail Marys to say, because although the conference was a great success, The Experiment completely went spla. Parameter # 6 states that we will cut ourselves slack while traveling, but I thought I could do better than I did.

Things fell apart as soon as I hit the airport. I bought my usual airport treat, a cup of tea and a scone at a certain well-known coffee chain, specifying that I did not want a lid on the cup. That message failed to get through, and when I called it to their attention, the baristas refused to remove the lid and reuse it, even though I had not touched the cup. I could see that a manager had put the fear of the State Public Health Division in them.

During my layover in Dallas-Ft. Worth I chose to eat lunch at a restaurant specifically on the basis of the pretty pictures showing food served on real plates with real cutlery. But when the food arrived, it was served on plastic with a plastic fork and knife. And a straw -- ARGH! -- in my drinking water.

My conference was in a resort and so all the meals and drinks there were served in durables. But Friday night we went out on the town, and the Margaritas arrived in plastic cups.

Finally, I spent an afternoon walking around town sightseeing in the pouring rain, and my sneakers got incredibly stinky. I dried them out and tried to freshen them up with a bit of soap, but to no avail. They were too foul to wear on the way home, and too foul to stuff into my suitcase with my good clothes. So I wrapped them in a new plastic laundry bag.

I did bring every bit of plastic I'd used home to recycle -- yes, carrying my used Margarita cup with me everywhere all evening on Friday -- but it was painful to lose control of The Experiment so thoroughly. I just have to keep muttering to myself "Parameter # 6, Pararmeter # 6, Parameter # 6."

Drawing a Line

For several years now I have subscribed to a certain women's fitness magazine. I like it all right: the healthy-eating tips, the workout how-to's, and the encouragement to keep on keepin' on are all mildly useful and make for good, lite reading on the treadmill.

But. These magazines are chockablock full of ads for -- can I just call them what they are? -- stupid plastic shit nobody needs. Hair smoothers. Wrinkle hiders. Pre-packaged snack foods. In my most recent issue, which is 210 pages long, I counted 151 pages partly or entirely devoted to ads, and another 29 pages of health and fitness "articles" that promote specific products, complete with photos, urls and celebrity endorsements. It's safe to assume the manufacturers pay for these product placements.

I understand that magazines turn a profit by selling advertising space. But I feel bombarded, and suspicious of sales pitches masquerading as journalism. And I've been increasingly annoyed by the disconnect between the "health" that is promoted in the pieces and the mountains of garbage they encourage us to generate, especially since some of the publication is devoted to "green" living.

So recently when my subscription ran out, I declined to renew. Just as well: new issues were always delivered in a plastic sheath.

10-10-10: Blogging for Social Change

Today we join tens of thousands of other writers, activists and concerned citizens for International Climate Action day, a day to raise awareness, pressure lawmakers and do something concrete to lower our ppm -- the parts per million of carbon dioxide molecules in our atmosphere that are trapping greenhouse gases and dangerously warming the planet.

Portland alone must have hosted half a dozen 10-10-10 events today. The one we chose to attend was a styrofoam recycling roundup at a local Episcopal church. We had a full carload of block polystyrene, hardly any of it ours -- Rick makes a point of picking it up when he sees it around town in dumpsters and recycling bins (the stuff isn't recyclable curbside here, but that doesn't stop some people from leaving it on the curb in their yellow bins). He keeps it in a friend's basement (thanks, Etienne!) and when he's amassed enough of it, he takes it to a recycler in town and pays $5-10 to have it recycled. But this event was free, and we liked participating in a community action.

What's the connection between styrofoam and climate change? Mainly, it's that plastic, like any product, takes energy to produce, and energy consumption almost always involves carbon emissions. So in addition to the environmental hazards that bookend plastic use -- on the one end, degradation involved in drilling for oil, from which plastic is made, and at the other end, degradation of habitat and endangerment to wildlife -- plastic contributes to the most pressing environmental issue of our time.

Of course, the production of all the alternatives to plastic also consume energy. Arguably it takes more energy to make glass, for example, than to make plastic, and it certainly takes more fossil fuels to transport glass than plastic because it's so much heavier. Glass, however, has a much longer shelf-life. Rick and I keep many of our glass containers indefinitely; pasta jars become jars for holding popcorn or rice (bought in bulk); mustard and jam jars get passed on to a friend who raises honey bees. Plastic tubs become leftover containers, but plastic quality degrades over time and eventually, out they go. There's a reason the words in the slogan "reduce, reuse, recycle" are in that order. Recycling is good, and we've been zealous and expert recyclers for some time. Reusing is better, and this is the part of the slogan where we are hanging out a lot these days. Best of all is not to buy stuff in the first place. That's the big challenge for the Experiment -- trying to lead a Make It From Scratch life in a pre-fab, single-use culture.

One thing that is already clear from our experiment is that there are no perfect solutions. Every choice involves a trade-off, and it's not always easy to measure our impact or discern which is the least of multiple evils. The best we can strive for is to be mindful -- to inform ourselves, make thoughtful decisions, and raise our voices together with those of other people who care.

The Nose Knows

Rick blew his nose on the last of the extant kleenex this morning, and we are turning to alternatives that do not come in cardboard boxes with a mouth of plastic film.

We are becoming throwbacks, each to a different time period. I myself have opted to swab my sniffer with a cotton hankie, as though it were the nineteenth century. Rick has another approach. For decades he has made a habit of squirreling away all the restaurant and fast-food napkins that come his way. Not that he pockets extras for his personal use -- but, barring a barbecue-sauce disaster, he figures the paper serviette that accompanies his food is good for another mouth-wipe or two. He stashes these in his backpack and then, when he gets home, into a paper bag, and dips into these for a variety of uses. I know -- it's a weird old bachelor miser habit. It makes Rick look some Depression-era survivor. He maintains he learned it as a young man from one dear departed Reverend Emmet Johnson, who no doubt was a child in the 30s. Turns out that the greenest 21st-century practices look a lot like the use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without ethic of generations past.

Bag the Bag

The city recently proposed a ban on plastic grocery bags, following the lead of San Francisco, Brownsville, two counties in Hawaii and the entire nation of Ireland. This being Portland, we saw quite a lot of support for the ban. And this being America, we also saw quite a lot of dissent. The newspaper was full of angry letters to the editor, particularly from dog owners who can't imagine how they will pick up poop without a steady supply of bags from grocery runs, but also from indignant shoppers who simply find it handier to cart their goods in plastic handle bags than in paper or in canvas.

You'd think from reading these letters that the Right to Convenience were enshrined in our constitution. But that attitude didn't surprise me. What surprised me was the implication that plastic bags are precious and hard to come by.

My own experience has been that simply by washing, drying and saving the plastic bags that come into our lives, we end up in very short order with far more bags than we can store. (We have one of those wooden bag-dryers; it lives on the kitchen counter and dries about eight bags at a time.) We've never used plastic grocery bags, and in the old days (before we stopped buying any plastic) our plastic-bag drawer was always full. We regularly recycled bags because there was no place else to put so many.

Now that even fewer are coming our way, we aren't moving as many out of the house -- and when The Experiment began we went through the collection and set aside the best bags to hang on to. I'm confident they will last the year. If they don't, we won't have to look very hard to find second-hand ones. We will not have to start taking virgin bags from the supermarket.

A Path

I decided to spend my September freebie (see Parameter # 5: we each get to make one plastic purchase per month) on seeds for the garden. It seemed fitting that if I were going to buy something in plastic, it would be something that would ultimately make a positive environmental contribution.

Slowly over the last few years (ever since my lawn mower bit the dust) I have been converting our front lawn to flower beds. I killed the grass by getting 50 or 60 cast-off burlap bags from a local coffee roaster and spreading them out over the lawn. When the grass was dead, I started planting other stuff.

The usual argument made in favor of the un-lawn is that grass -- America's most commonly-grown crop -- devours fertilizers and water. We've never used fertilizers on our lawn, and we let it go dormant in the summer, so it really wasn't using resources. But today, instead of a monoculture, the front yard is a riot of species. The soil, teeming with critters micro and macro, is healthier than that of the typical American grass lawn. Many different plants live here, attracting beneficial spiders and insects, including pollinators, and the wild birds that eat them. Biodiversity is important, even in the city, and our little garden space is making its contribution to the health of our bioregion. Plus it's a lot more interesting to look at than grass.

Over the years, however, I've discovered that a garden path is a useful thing. I've tried making them from pea gravel, from bark dust, and from straw, but in this climate those all get quickly taken over by weeds. So I've turned back to grass as the most viable material for path-making.

Now, typical lawn grass grows so quickly in Portland's wet, warmish springs that it has to be mowed twice a week, a fact I bitterly resented in my lawn days of old. So I've taken to making paths of an alternative called Enviro-lawn, which is comprised of a mixture of fescue, ryegrass, yarrow, clover and small wildflowers. It makes a lush, slightly meadowy carpet that grows slowly. I've made two successful paths with it, and now I want to make more. So I spent my September free pass on a plastic bag of Enviro-lawn seed.


I bought some plants, too, and of course they came in plastic pots -- but the folks at the nursery said they would take them back and reuse them if I returned the empties, so I did.

Snack Attack

I think I have mentioned that cookies are one of Rick's staple foods. An important holiday food is the potato chip (and its similarly fried and packaged relatives.) Chips are not a daily habit, and Rick doesn't eat them alone -- he's a social eater. But it's baseball season, a time when boisterous, hungry men sometimes appear in our living room bearing plastic bags full of salty crunchables and creating a bit of a moral dilemma: be true to the experiment, or be true to old friends and the traditions that bring us together?

Luckily, just this year Frito-Lay has come out with a compostable chip bag made of plant fibers. I'm not in the business of promoting potato chips and their makers. I'm just saying --  if you feel the need to have chips with your ball game and you're trying to avoid plastic, you have options.

The new bag is unbelievably noisy. I don't think you could hear the game if you ate straight from the bag. And it doesn't solve certain problems (such as high sodium content and the Mariners' pathetic offensive play.)
Also there remains the question of how to compost this bag. The instructions on the back state that it requires a hot compost pile, which we don't have. (We compost, but we're lazy composters who don't turn or moisten our pile or pay any attention to the ratio of nitrogen to carbon. So our compost pile is slow and cool.)

This is a problem that's turning up in lots of places as biodegradable alternatives to plastic appear on the market. Here's an example: the college where I teach introduced service ware made of cornstarch in its cafeterias last year. It's terrific that we're not using plastic spoons and forks any more, but what becomes of the corn utensils? Currently they go in the garbage, where their biodegradability remains purely theoretical: no matter how organically grown, stuff doesn't break down in the landfill, because there's not enough oxygen under the weight of all that refuse.

I think solutions to these problems will come on line over time. This year, one of the campuses of my college has purchased a "Rocket composter" to break down its cafeteria food waste. The Rocket will probably be able to handle cornstarch service ware, and if all goes well, the other campuses will get their own Rockets. And the city of Portland has started a pilot project to collect home compost just like it does yard debris. Perhaps eventually we'll be able to put our compostable chip bags in a curbside bin.

Meanwhile, we're making a noisy little collection of those crinkly plant fiber bags, and the pennant race can proceed with its snacking traditions intact.

The Grasshopper and the Ants

We really blew it.

We should have been spending this whole past summer buying (or even growing) fresh produce and freezing it. Now there will be no frozen berries to enliven our winter days, no frozen peas to bejewel our casseroles, no lima beans to keep our roast chickens company.We won't get rickets: in this climate, there is plenty of fresh, local produce year-round. Brussels sprouts are a pretty good consolation prize for the advent of dark days and icky weather. Still, twelve months is a long time to go without raspberries. We fiddled our whole summer away and put up nothing. What on earth were we thinking?

Eau là là

Here are two recent innovations in Europe to reduce the ubiquitous plastic water bottle:


lhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/8016115/Italy-bans-the-plastic-water-bottle-along-heritage-coastline.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/21/paris-park-fizzy-water-tap

In the Dead of Night

Some years ago we contacted the Oregonian and asked that the paper be delivered naked, without the plastic bag that is pro forma in these rainy parts. Our paper guy was perfectly cheerful about our request and has never screwed up. Once in a while he goes on vacation and the paper comes bagged, but otherwise the arrangement's gone off without a hitch.

Other plastics have inveigled themselves onto our front porch, though, without discussion. In the wee hours of the morning today, our paper was served with a cereal sample. Macy's buys full-page ads on the inside of the paper, but General Mills has a different approach: they buy a one-time delivery service. A mini-box of Fiber One (with a plastic bag encasing the cereal inside, of course), a Fiber One breakfast bar encased in not-even-recyclable plastic, and a coupon came together in an obnoxiously large plastic bag, unbidden by us and of course unwanted.

Then a little while later someone left a copy of this year's Yellow Pages -- redundant and pointless in the Internet age, tree-killing and of course enveloped in a plastic bag -- on our porch.

We will make some phone calls, return the phone directory if we can, ask to be taken off lists, ask if we can be exempted from all these unasked-for freebies that come with the paper. We don't know if these actions will actually save plastic on the other end. What becomes of the extras? Do they serve any useful end? For all we know, our paper itself does come sheathed in film, and our paper guy just slips it out each early morning before dropping the paper at our door -- happily obliging our eccentricities, merrily unaware of our purposes, chucking the bag in the garbage can on his way back to the car.

Sneaky Plastics

We're starting to see a pattern.

We're pretty good at avoiding the plastics we know about. But plastics are everywhere, and sometimes they sneak into our lives without our being aware of them. The straw that comes with the drink you order. The tiny spout under the metal lid on a glass jar of olive oil. The party favors.

The what? Well, I had a mammogram earlier this week, a process that entails an impressive amount of squashing of delicate female parts. They want you to come back every year, so they entice you to the office with free coffee and Sudoku puzzles, and when the strange indignity is over they give you a present. My present was wrapped in brown paper with a pink bow, but when I got it home it turned out to be bath crystals in, wouldn't you know it, a plastic bag.

I think this year of no plastics is going to turn on anticipating these tiny acts of plastic transfer, and getting into some habits: "NO BAG." "NO LID." "NO STRAW." "No, thank you."

A Slip-Up, a Judgment Call and a Singularly Uninteresting Soup

You may recall that I'm skipping soups that come in aseptic containers and endeavoring to cook my school lunches myself. Today I made a soup -- a real soup, from a reputable cookbook, not some feeble effort of my own -- and remembered why I don't cook. Granted I had to leave out the soy sauce because I can't do soy. And the cooking sherry. I don't exactly know what cooking sherry is, but we surely don't have any, so I threw in a little red wine instead. The finished soup, though it had lovely barley and mushrooms in it, was bland. I added some extra salt and butter, but to little avail. So then I opened a can of black beans and dumped them in, and now I have a high-protein version of the original that still looks and tastes like dirty dishwater, with chunky bits.

Meanwhile, we realized that not only our peanut butter jar but also our jam jars come with little plastic rings of purity around them. I don't know what we will do. We might prevail upon our friend Melissa, a prodigious homemade jam-maker, to see us through the year. Either that or reconsider the Parameters. This much I know: without jam, Rick will perish. Jam is one of the Four Food Groups (the others being mustard, cookies, and barbecue sauce -- all with similar attendant problems.)

And I found myself skewered on the horns of a dilemma Saturday. I attended an all-day workshop for which I had paid a fee that included the cost of a "sack lunch." But in that sack, of course, was a sandwich wrapped in plastic film and a salad in a plastic clamshell. I'd already bought it; no plastic would be spared if I were to turn it down (and I'd have been useless for the second half of the workshop.) But now I know I have to think ahead about things like that, and probably make phone calls and ask for special exceptions to be made on my funny little experimental behalf.

Our First Trip to the Grocery Store

Sunday is shopping day, and we went prepared, even more than usual, laden with clean used plastic and paper bags for bulk items. Truth is we'd picked all the low-hanging fruit a long time ago: we've long been in the habit of avoiding plastic packaging as much as seemed practical, and bought a lot of things in bulk already, nearly always with our own re-used bags. Here are the changes we are making:

* I am throwing over ready-made soup in asceptic containers (because it has a plastic pop-top) and planning to make my own soups. Ask me in a month how that's going; I need to leave for work in an hour, and the barley is simmering away, hard as tiny pebbles, as I write.)

* Polenta is one of our staples but we always before bought it ready-made in plastic tubes. Now we are buying uncooked polenta in bulk and preparing it ourselves. Preparation involves boiling it in water. I think we can handle it.

* Tortillas are another staple and of course they come in plastic bags. We bought bulk flour and are going to endeavor to make our own. Ask me in a month...

* The third staple that traditionally generates a lot of plastic is feta cheese. It's the only dairy product either of us eat, and it's spendy and comes from French sheep, and I have to say it is one of life's deepest joys. I was prepared to go to some lengths to get it. Normally we buy it in those flat round plastic containers, recyclable, yes, but we get one every week and they add up. So we talked to the deli guys about our project, and they were great. The feta comes from France in honkin' huge blocks, in buckets of brine, and the deli guys can cut it into chunks of any size and dimension. So I asked for a chunk, like so, to be wrapped in brown waxed paper. Then I popped it into a pyrex container of my own I'd brought from home. No problem. This method is a variation on the pot-pie approach: it's not a violation of state law for the deli guy to simply hand you your food unpackaged. What you do with it after that is your own business.

* We screwed up a little, too. Peanut butter in a glass jar with a metal lid seems a paragon of virtue, but in fact it has a little protective ring of plastic around the outside of the lid that we didn't think about. Of course you can get pb in bulk, grinding it yourself, but it's not nearly as yummy as Adam's. We'll have to give that one some thought.

The First Deadly Sin

For some years now I have been slathering myself with sunscreen during all daylight hours, 365 days a year. Mind you, I live in the Pacific Northwest, where the cloud cover nine months of the year is a wool blanket. There is exactly no chance that a ray of tanning or burning sunlight can penetrate it. Ergo, I cannot make the argument that I'm protecting myself from skin cancer. I'm afraid it's all in the service of Vanity.

Skin-care experts (most of them sellers of sunscreen, I suppose) tell us that only three evils are responsible for wrinkled skin: cigarettes (not an issue for me); the passage of time (don't know of any OTC products that address that); and light. Every time a UV ray, however feeble, reaches our skin, it wrinkles it just that tiny bit more. So I've made a practice of embalming myself in sunscreen. Vanity.

(I've reasoned that I have lost time to make up for. I was an adolescent in an era when we basted ourselves in mineral oil and went to "lie out" in the back yard. The boredom nearly killed me, but I did it in the service of Vanity.)

Sunscreen poses ethical issues for me beyond those of my own character. The stuff is contributing to the demise of the coral reefs. Even if you live in Kansas, it rinses off, and that water eventually reaches the sea, right? Avobenzone and other unpronounceables in commercial sunscreens are toxic to the already fragile and threatened corals. I've tried all the groovy non-toxic susncreens on the market, but they go on like cake frosting and make you look like you're ready for Kabuki theater.

So now that we're doing the no-plastics year, I really, really can't justify the Coppertone. I'm setting aside what I've got on hand until the summer months (when they will fall under the Parameter of medical necessity) and bravely going bareskinned.

And if you see a woman driving in the rain this winter in a wide-brimmed hat, dark glasses and kid gloves, you'll know who she is.

Bagels and Pot Pies and Bags, Oh My!

Oh boy oh boy! Our first challenges!

Remember that we've been traveling and haven't gone grocery shopping since we got back -- so there's virtually nothing to eat in the house. I made a nice breakfast burrito with canned refried beans, a tortilla, and an egg. Rick looked in the fridge and then said in a desultory voice, "I want bagels."

Bagels, of course,come in a plastic bag. Unless you buy them the expensive way, what Rick calls "by the each."

Maybe you could take your own bag into the bagel shop and ask to buy them in bulk? Off Rick went to the bagelerie, but he lost his nerve, or something, and ended up buying an expensive single bagel to eat on the spot, with a cup of hot chocolate (not in a to-go cup, of course.) Maybe another day.

But then he had a great triumph at the grocery store. Summer is over; the fall rains, dreary gray skies and relentless chill have set in, but there's good news: it's pot-pie season. Our groc shop makes homemade pot pies so fabulous they almost make winter worth it. So Rick went to the pot-pie counter and asked to be handed the pies without said pies first being stuffed into baggies, which is the usual practice. State law is stern about the matter of deli items going into second-hand containers: it's a no-no, because of the cooties. But it seems that if no second-hand container is involved in the transaction, and the pie is just handed directly to the customer to bag for himself, well then...

Just Under the Wire

As great good luck would have it, several critically important items in my life made with plastic conked out and were replaced just before the Sept. 15 deadline.

First, my two old printers expired on the same day. I took them to Free Geek -- a local place that takes donations of second-hand electronics to be disassembled and reassembled with what's salvageable and that recycles what cannot be reused. I ordered a new printer the day we left for vacation, knowing there wouldn't be time to find one when we got back before The Experiment started.

Then, unbeknownst to me, my wonderful family conspired in our absence to get us a new computer. The old computer, which I'd bought when my nearly-20-year-old was in sixth grade, was like an ancient arthritic dog, struggling to get on its feet every morning and hobbling with every step. I was in despair: it really needed to be put down, humanely, but a new computer would be chockablock full of plastic.

But lo! The aforementioned child, who has discovered a passion for building computers, and my parents, who hate to see me suffer, slyly got together while Rick and I were in Yosemite. Sam contributed his time and expertise and my folks ponied up for those components that needed to be bought -- some parts of the computer were salvaged from other computers -- and together they made us a magnificent new computer that bounds through its tasks like an excited puppy.

Parameters of the Experiment

A few readers might arrive at the doorstep of this blog wondering why, or even, why on earth? But I suspect most readers drawn to this site already have a pretty good handle on why, and what they want to know is how.

How, therefore, will be the focus of this blog for the next twelve months, as my partner-in-saving-the-world and I endeavor to live a life free, or very nearly free, of plastics in every form. I'll dip into why from time to time, but mostly I'll be writing about the practical challenges, inspirations, frustrations, workarounds and insights we have as we try to navigate daily life without modern life's most ubiquitous synthetic polymers.

On a recent road trip -- a kind of Mardi Gras to our long impending Lent -- we set out some parameters for our experiment:

1. We will trust each others' judgment; we don't have to call each other in the middle of the day to make agonizing mutual decisions about purchases. But we'll check in daily, or nearly daily, about our experiences and I will blog accordingly. I promise to quote Rick sounding funny and charming.

2. When we run into purchases that we consider truly necessary for which there exists no alternative, we will cringe and buy plastic, making those decisions on a case-by-case basis. (Example: Rick may very well need a new vehicle some time in the coming year. Vehicles contain vinyl, which is the root of all evil. But what are ya gonna do?)

3. We make an exception to the no-plastics rule for items of medical necessity, including vitamins and over-the-counter and prescription meds.

4. We make an exception for cat food. (No, cat food isn't made of plastic, except maybe the kind from China. Though bulk cat food exists, our four cats eat a prescription food from the vet -- see Rule # 3 -- that comes only in huge plastic bags.)

5. We each get one free pass per month. (We may have to further refine this parameter. I was thinking along the lines of cheese, but what if one of us wants to spend our free pass on, say, a Zeppelin?)

6. Without becoming profligates, we will cut ourselves slack while travelling, because we will have less control over our purchases and fewer options.

7. Our main aim is to avoid creating demand for the manufacture of new plastic items. If an alternative to plastic (such as glass) is not an option, we will look for second-hand versions of the items we seek.

8. We may end up spending silly amounts of time on this experiment, or burning up extra fossil fuels in our pursuit to be plastic-free, or otherwise using resources in ways that are not sensible. We are not going to worry about it. To try to be perfect is madness, and we are mentally ill enough as it is.