Plastic, plastic, plastic!

A light dish-washing day
© L Kathryn Grace

Aaaaarrrrrggggh! I've spent most of the afternoon trying to solve three problems without bringing more plastic into the house. I'm about to utter a very bad word out loud.

Here's the thing. In my quest to reduce and eventually become a zero waste household, I try to make every purchase count. Rule of thumb before buying (it wasn't always so) is this: Do we really need this item? Can we solve this problem without buying something new? Will our lives be better with this thing? Truly? Can we get it on FreeCycle? Craigslist?

Once I've made up my mind that bringing something new into the house is worth the trouble, the big question is: How can I meet this perceived need ...

• Without buying more plastic;
• Without contributing to unfair labor practices; and 
• With the least possible harm to the planet and its ecosystems?

Here's what I'm up against today. Wait. I'll share the search for just one of the items--similar issues for all three, boiled into one scenario. A little background first.

Racking up change

For the last nine or ten months, I've worked and cooked at home. Where food counts, we've changed our lifestyle drastically. In the past, with both of us working outside the home, it was not uncommon to eat all three meals out. When we did eat in, quite often we ordered delivery. Luckily, we live in a town where local and organic may be difficult, but not impossible to find on a daily basis, so our eating out habit was nourished with good food that met some of our needs to be socially responsible.

Now that I'm cooking most of our meals from scratch, and preserving some foods, I'm spending more and more of my day in the kitchen. I'm constantly looking for efficiencies--big and small. One I would like to achieve is in cleanup. We don't have an automatic dishwasher--not that we wouldn't like one. An efficient dishwasher saves water and energy, but we don't own one, and there's not much room for it if we did. I wash most of the dishes these days. Typically, I let them air dry.

Back in the day, all we needed was a small dish drainer for the occasional cereal bowl, soup pot, utensils. Now that I'm washing dishes one or even several times a day, depending on the cooking projects, the tiny Rubbermaid drainer we've had for years isn't holding enough. Hence, the photograph illustrating this post.

Know this. I. am. not. taking. time. to. dry. every. dish. (I don't iron my sheets either, thank you, Ann Landers.) Nope. Tried it. It's just not happening. I need a bigger dish drainer.

We’re changing, the world’s changing—Catch up manufacturers!

Every few months, a cup falls off the stack, breaks, and I go on line, hoping to find a new rack that will meet my needs at last. The non-plastic options are wood, bamboo, and stainless steel, all small. If there is a large dish drainer on the market without plastic parts, I have not found it.

There are some near misses, but none entirely suits. This Simple Human dish drainer is the one I like best. It's big enough. Has that handy knife rack and a good-sized utensil holder. Downside: It has significant plastic features. Plus, I have no idea where it is made. Their web site doesn't mention that. If they're using Fair Trade practices, they're not bragging about it. What about materials? Where are they sourced? How are they extracted? And did you notice that price tag? Maybe that's what stainless steel and plastic are worth these days. How can I know?

Then there's this Zojila Rohan dish drainer. It's sleek, upscale, designer-looking, all stainless steel except for little plastic feet. I like it too, but it's not going to hold nearly enough. Who knows where and how it was made, and by whom? Plus, there's that astronomical price tag--again. But hey, it's pretty and functional--if you don't have many dishes.

I noodled around a bunch of green sites, hoping to come up with anything else. Nada. Maybe I missed something.

Ideally, I could walk into my local Ace Hardware, or take the train and bus to a big-box store, and find a rack that meets my need. With luck, they would have something on the shelf, not in a box, not wrapped in Styrofoam and shrink-wraped and tied down with five or six plastic ties.

It would have been shipped on a pallet with fifty or so others, which would itself, of course, have been triple shrink-wrapped to prevent damage enroute, but at least it would have been shipped on one big truck headed for one destination, or two if the store has a regional distribution center. Oh, geesh, there's just no getting around it. Buying anything requires buying products of indeterminate origin, rarely manufactured under fair trade policies, and shipped hither and yon on one shrink-wrapped pallet after another. Fissel.

A less than ideal solution or no solution at all

What's a world-saving granny to do? Without. That's what. Three or four months down the road, I'll break another dish, drop another pot on the floor for the umpteenth time because I didn't want to take an extra twenty minutes to dry the dishes, and I'll start the search again. Will there be anything new? Something to ease my buyer's angst? Doubtful. Who knows? I'm open to suggestions.

For today, there will be no online orders, no trips to the giant kitchen supply stores, and no shrink-wrap to wad up and throw in the trash.

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  Disclosure:  If you follow one of the Amazon links above and purchase something, it is possible I will earn a few pennies. What a thrill that would be.

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We make peace in a million small ways every day.

All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.

Earth Day pledge: One year War on Garbage

Recycling basket and kitchen waste bin
© L. Kathryn Grace

How is it possible that a two-person household can generate nearly 20 gallons of waste every week? I'm declaring a War on Garbage.

It's not like we haven't been conscious of the crud stuffing our can and recycling basket. After all, way back in 1972, I met the man who would become the father of my children when I spoke to the high school ecology club for which he was the teacher sponsor. The topic: Recycling. Our kids grew up with stacks of newspapers and magazines tied up with string, counter tops littered with rinsed cans and bottles, sacks and boxes of sorted waste piling up in the basement, waiting to be hauled to the recycling center.

Collected waste basket trash
© L. Kathryn Grace

Despite a lifelong commitment to reducing consumption and waste, my sweetie and I fill the 2.3 gallon trash bin and large recycling basket you see above at least once a week. Twice a week, I go through the house and gather waste from six small baskets, dump them in a plastic bag like this one, add a pound or so of dirty cat litter, tie off and pitch. Plus, every day I scoop and dump an additional mini batch of cat litter. None of that is recyclable.

Counter-top compost bucket
© L. Kathryn Grace

Then there's kitchen waste. Last fall, when San Francisco mandated that all households, including apartment buildings, separate food and yard trimmings for city-wide composting, we bought a counter-top crock for collecting food waste. Not having access to a garden, we welcomed the change and fill the half gallon crock three or four times a week.

All told, we're discarding roughly 20 gallons of trash, recyclables and compostables a week. Multiply that by 52, and we're shuffling 1,040 gallons of refuse through the system every year. That's just two people. That doesn't account for our contributions to the waste stream at work. According to the Clean Air Council, the average American pitches 4.39 pounds a day. That's about 1563 pounds a year. I don't know how much our 20 gallons of trash weighs. Either way, our 1,040 gallons or the U.S. average of 1,563 pounds per person seems an incredible amount of junk and gunk.

Peacemonger that I am, I'm declaring a personal war on garbage. We're tossing far too much stuff down our garbage chute. As Julia Butterfly Hill says, speaking of our throw-away culture, there is no away. When we toss something, whether its to the recycling facility or to the land fill, it never goes away. The one exception: Making compost from kitchen scraps and yard waste is such a boon for the soil, gardeners call it Black Gold. That's the silver lining in our personal garbage can story.

Next up: What to do about it? First step in my personal war on garbage: Analyze what we're pitching. I'll talk about that in the next post, and set my first objective toward reducing waste.

What about you? How much garbage do you dump every week? What have you been doing to reduce? How much do you recycle? Are you up for declaring a war on waste in your household?

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We make peace in a million small ways every day.

All text and images, unless otherwise noted, copyright L. Kathryn Grace. All rights reserved.