The last time I wrote about doing laundry without plastic was June 17, 2009. Â Obama was our new president, and Michael Jackson was still alive (he died a week later). Â It’s time for an update. Plastic-Free Soap Nuts Laundry Soap Back in the day, we used powdered Ecover laundry detergent, in part because it came […]
It’s super easy to make your own beef jerky.  But before I get into how, let me explain why.  Beef jerky (or any kind of jerky, for that matter) is not something I normally eat or even think about.  But in 2015, while planning for the annual Burning Man festival in the Black Rock Desert, I […]
Last November, I decided it was time to get rid of the small, ratty, and possibly toxic table-top ironing board we’d been using for years.  And by we, I mean Michael.  Still haunted by memories of ironing my dad’s shirts in the dank basement laundry room while the crickets chirped and imaginary mice scurried from corner […]
Back in April I promised a post about making broth.  Well, here it is.  Actually, this is more like two posts in one.  There’s broth that you make from scratch in order to get all the nutritious goodness out of the food scraps you have left, and then there’s broth (or stock) that you need in […]
There are a lot of things I make myself to avoid products in plastic packaging.  I make my own chocolate syrup, for example, to avoid the kind in the squeeze bottle.  And I’ve made my own cleaning and personal care products for years.  But when it comes to durable goods, I’ve often opted to let someone else […]
Are you still rubbing plastic all over your face? Since I first reported on microbeads–those tiny bits of plastic added to facial scrubs, toothpaste, and other personal care products–in 2007 and then again in 2013, the NY Times has reported on them, several U.S. states have passed legislation to ban them,  Canada is on the verge of […]
As I mentioned in my last post, I’m trying to reduce the number of supplements I take (and hence, supplement packaging) by getting my nutrients from whole foods instead of pills. Â So a few weeks ago, I was wondering aloud (apparently, I’ve started talking to myself a lot lately) about how I could get more […]
I felt like I was back in kindergarten yesterday… cutting and pasting with paste you could eat if you wanted to. Â I’m taking my plastics information display to the ReUseConex in Portland tomorrow and wanted to make it sturdier. Taping paper pages directly to the wooden board was not working well. Â The paper curled […]
Halloween Plastic can be scary!  But blogger Amber Dohrenwend has one solution to Halloween plastic.  She’s the author of The Cardboard Collective, a blog about using recycled cardboard (the kind you would fish out of the cardboard only recycling bin or dumpster) to create toys, crafts, and furniture. She lives in a small apartment in Tokyo, […]
Several months ago, blogger EcoCatLady left a comment on this blog about how she had avoided buying new plastic when her kitties needed a climbing tree by figuring out how to build one herself with all secondhand materials. She wrote: My most recent success was that I wanted to get my kids (meaning kids of […]