A quick look around the garden centre at your local Walmart though, will give you an idea of how much plastic is consumed by modern gardeners. I’ve blogged about reducing plastic in the garden before. This post is specifically about alternatives to plastic pots and planters. I recently retrieved two stainless still sinks from a local illegal dumping site. After I repurposed them to make a feeding station to feed cow’s milk to my pigs, I did a quick search to see what other people do with free stainless steel kitchen sinks. The main uses are BBQ grills and planters.

Almost anything that was originally designed to contain something can be repurposed to contain potting soil. If you are growing food, you need to carefully both the material the container is made from and the former contents. A stainless steel kitchen sink is a great option.

During the last two years I have also used other reusable shopping bags. Some of them wore out prematurely because of bad design. Some of them were used to contain items that we were giving to friends or donating to charity. Others were simply left in our rented homes when we moved on.

The most common problem with all the inferior shopping bags was handle failure. A shopping gab without handles is next to useless. The two wrapsack bags that we have had since 2009 have handle material that goes all the way to the bottom of the bag.

Today I bought raw milk from a vending machine. I am just visiting so I didn’t have my own container. The dairy also has a vending machine for sterile containers. Unfortunately, all but the bottom row of these empty containers are plastic. The price of a new plastic milk bottle from the vending machine is high enough to strongly encourage reuse. I was lucky enough to show up just when the farmer was switching out the stainless steel milk tank that sits inside the vending machine with a fresh one. He generously gave me a free glass bottle. The cost from the vending machine was 1 Euro.

There are a few things that I really like about this business model. Mostly I love the way that it encourages the reuse of containers.

I am not a raw milk advocate in particular. I think consumers should have the right to eat or drink just about anything they want as long as they take the responsibility to be informed about the benefits and risks associated with what they are putting in their bodies. Producers bear some responsibilities too. For a long time the majority of dairy producers have taken a ‘better safe than sorry’ attitude about pasteurization. If a large dairy cooperative did not pasteurize their milk, the safety of the milk would rely on whoever was the weakest link in the supply chain. The milk that I bought comes from one farm that has been operating these machines for several years. It was delicious.

Beth Terry’s blog about her plastic free life is now called My Plastic-free Life. Here’s a great post about Plastic Easter Eggs. Below is a video of Beth at TED

Green Mountain Coffee company recently told their investors they project selling 3 billion k-cups next year! The “Green” minded company was also embarrased to admit the “single-use” coffee model is environmentally wasteful

Above is a quote from KBrewLids.com, a company that sells foil lids designed to allow for reuse of the popular K-cups, or Keurig Coffee Pods. They say that the ostensibly single use pod can actually be used ten times.

Reuse is, of course, the second best of the three R’s. Reducing is always better. If you don’t use K-cups, don’t start. There are plenty of plastic free ways to brew coffee. My favorite way is with a French Press.

If your workplace has made the switch to k-cups, you can still avoid the single use sacrilege by using reusable filter that is designed to fit in the Keurig brewer.

This is SCARY.

Here’s a tip for all you trick or treaters – Pillow cases have way more capacity than these dorky plastic jack’o'lanterns.

I have spent several years living in countries where Halloween isn’t widely celebrated. I don’t want to be seen as a killjoy, but this is seriously one tradition that could be abandoned with no real loss to society. The dark forces behind rampant consumerism are what keep it alive.

If you are thinking about taking up a hobby that entails buying fake plastic trees online, maybe you should take a look at bonsai first.

I have delved into this topic before, but since everyone should get e new toothbrush every 3 months or and/or after any bout of cold or flu symptoms, I think it’s time for a fresh look at the topic.

I have to confess that my family’s replacement habits lie somewhere between the dentists recommendation and the average behavior. A poll of Americans revealed that people replace their toothbrush on average 1.9 times per year.

I am not going to order a bone and bristle toothbrush from the UK. They are expensive and they probably require more energy to produce than a typical modern toothbrush. The company that makes these non-plastic brushes imports badger hair from China where the badger may be killed using inhumane methods and at unsustainable rates.

One way to reduce the amount of plastic waste resulting from your toothbrush purchase is to buy family packs, even if you aren’t a family. The conventional packaging for toothbrushes typically involves plastic. Bulk packages typically use less packaging per unit. The only option available to me at the supermarket was a two pack. It had roughly the same amount of packaging as for a single toothbrush.

An even better way to reduce waste is to buy at toothbrush that is designed with replaceable bristles. I bought a Trisa brand brush last year and the overall reduction in plastic waste was listed at 72% just from buying the handle and 2 sets of bristles. The disappointing thing was that there was no local retailer selling replacement heads. If I ever find a store display with toothbrushes and replacement heads, I will stock up. I am going to have my teeth for a long time.

I am a little bit disappointed that the two brands that I have looked into both package replacement toothbrush heads in plastic. One brand, Trisa, sells TWO new heads in a toothbrush sized plastic hanging package. I have to wonder why they don’t sell them in packs of three or four if their logistics demand that the package have those dimensions. Fuchs has a similar product and they put four replacements in a package. Fuchs is an American company and their products are distributed through United Natural Foods (UNFI), Mountain Peoples Distributors, Rainbow Distributing, Lotus Light Natural Body Care and Tree of Life.

If you have confidence in your local recycling programs, you might prefer to buy a recycled and recyclable toothbrush. Check out PreserveProducts.com. They also do a better job on minimizing packaging than most other toothbrush manufacturers

When my son had a problem with his laptop overheating, I looked to the computer shop for a solution. There are lots of laptop coolers on the market these days and most of them do the job that they were designed for reasonably well. But they are mostly plastic and I have no doubt that they don’t function for more than a few years before they become junk. I actually disassembled my son’s unit after it started failing. The low power fan motors are no match for a few stray human hairs. I was able to fix it, but those tiny motors will probably give up sooner or later.

I have spent the last year or so with a netbook as my primary workstation. This tiny laptop generates a fair amount of heat. One day I borrowed my son’s laptop cooler to see if my netbook would function better if it was kept cooler. It was a very unscientific trial but I think the machine really does work better if heat can be moved out of it’s body faster. I haven’t bought a plastic laptop cooler. I realized that they main reason that a netbook heats up is because it sits almost flush with the surface that it sits on. My solution couldn’t be more simple. I grabbed a scrap of ceramic tile from a local construction site. It is about 1/2 inch thick by 12 inch long by 2 inches wide. I put the back feet of my netbook up on this to provide more space for the heat to dissipate. It seems to help.

I think with any household problem it’s a good idea to look for waste free DIY solutions before resorting to the stroe-bought solutions that are being marketed.

I don’t want to make any kind of broad assumption. There may have been a few reusable steel water bottles at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28.

I have a dream of a land where single serving plastic water bottles are socially unacceptable and events such as this provide free potable water straight from a tanker truck.