tea-kettle

For all the late arrivals to PlasticLess, I want to take a moment to point out that this blog is about using LESS plastic. I have not taken an extreme stand against plastic like some other bloggers. Take a look at blogs like FakePlasticFish, Living Plastic Free and Life Less Plastic and you will see that it is possible to go through life while consuming a negligible amount of plastic. You will also see that it is not all that easy.

My efforts to reduce my plastic consumption had a major setback when I moved to a new country. Now that I have had a chance to settle in, I am going to try to make some positive changes.

My focus this week is going to be on our tea habit. First off I should rhyme off the stuff that we are already doing right. We don’t have a plastic kettle or plastic cups or plastic spoons. We don’t buy our water in plastic bottles. The plastic Brita Pitcher that we bought in Italy last month hasn’t paid for itself yet, but I am pretty sure we avoided consuming about 30 plastic water bottles. My confidence in the tap water is now as solid as any of my other useful delusions.

So what is the problem? The tea comes in a plastic bag. Loose tea is the most popular form of tea in this country and the shop next door sells two sizes of packaged loose tea. I am going to search for a source of bulk loose tea and I will get them to weigh it in my cloth bag. I am going to do the same with mint as well. Sugar is a different story. The shops all have plastic bags weighed out ahead of time. I think I will try to get my next door neighbor to weigh it straight into a container. I will try to faithfully document my efforts to deplasticize this aspect of my everyday life over the next few days.

There is a clue to next week’s project in the reflections on the tea kettle.

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