Using our own containers to buy foods from bulk bins is one of the primary ways to avoid plastic packaging while grocery shopping. But it’s not always easy, especially when you’re just beginning your plastic-free journey. First, you have to find shops in your area that offer foods from...
Beyond the usual recycling and residential composting, we were surprised to see public compopsting bins in such a large city. Delicious dumplings at Enginomo. The culinary scene in Lyon includes a good variety of food choices, not just French Gastronomie. The “Pot Lyonnais” The usual French...
Because dried beans are a great source of protein we can purchase plastic-free from bulk bins using our own bags and containers. Canned beans, on the other hand, are problematic because mostmetal cans are lined with plastic which contains BPA, a hormone-disrupting chemical. And for me, even...
From what I’ve seen, the stock for the bulk bins comes in much bigger bags than we would buy on the shelf. Even if the packaging is plastic, a huge bag of something is going to require much less plastic than multiple small bags. But stay tuned on this because I’m planning a visi...
Because they have partnered with Recyclebank to reward people who pledge to take back their Ziploc bags to grocery store recycle bins to be recycled. Notice: Ziploc is not actually taking back the bags. They are rewarding people who go to the Ziploc page on the Recyclebank website, enter a...
(as well as Berkeley and San Francisco) we have city-wide composting. We can put all of our food scraps (including meat) and food-soiled paper, along with yard waste, into our green bins. It’s then picked up with our garbage and taken to a commercial compost facility where our food...
New Year's Resolution #2: Generate less plastic waste from medicine and supplement packaging. Okay, before I continue, I have to give the usual caveat: I am not a doctor and nothing I write in this post or anywhere on this blog should be construed as me
Composting took away so much of volume from our garbage that only a tiny empty bag of chips was enough to hold our trash. Since it sat inside our huge plastic bin on the curbside, nobody seemed to mind. The empty sandbags that I stored away in our garage served as our yard wast...
This post is about toxic adhesives used to apply labels to food packaging and whether or not those chemicals can migrate into our foods. But it's also a convoluted story about the foul odor emanating from the general direction of my dishwasher. Stinky Di
For those who are able, there is a system for composting dog poop in your backyard. I haven’t tried this myself (because we don’t have a dog) but I’d be interested to hear from someone who has. Here are instructions formaking your own dog waste composter. And here is adog was...