Plastic free July

This month my zero-waste facebook group wanted to take the Plastic free July challenge. (If you click here, you'll find all of the rules and details.) Since I run the group, I figured I definitely should take the challenge. For the most part, I feel like Matt and I have reached a pretty good point between producing less trash and living in our budget. But for this month only, I decided to take it a bit farther and try out the things that we choose not to do.

So here are some of our weak spots for plastic.

- Candy bars

- meat and cheese

- diapers

- condiments

- yogurt and hummus

- bread

- straws 

- berries

- junk food in general 

Candy bars 

We LOVE milka bars, so much so that Madeleine will walk past the whole isle of  American candy bars to the International section. Then she stands on her tiptoes and grabs to milka bars and sticks them in the cart. We have been able to avoid these so far by making more sweets at home and loading up on berries.

Meat and Cheese

I found out that our whole foods will wrap meat and cheese in paper.  (Well kind of. The cheese guy wrapped it in plastic and then paper.) The only thing is it's expensive. Not really worth it. But the cheese we got was amazing! I also found a local butcher who will put meat aside on slaughter day, but again out of our budget. But it's nice to know those are options. Whole Foods does do meat specials regularly so maybe I'll start looking at those more often.

Date night at the Butcher's market

Diapers

We've been a lot better about cloth diapers this month! They are super super easy with our new washer and dryer.

Condiments

I've been better at making them and buying them in bulk this month. 

Yogurt and hummus

I still haven't found a good yogurt starter or a good hummus recipe. Working on these.

Bread

Whole foods and the bakery across from the library will give it to me plastic free. I'm going to try yet another recipe though this week. At this point I can make it, just Matt want one that taste better like Trader Joe's.

Straws

I really don't pay attention to this one. Going to work on it, since it's so easy.

Berries

It's berry season so we've been able to pick our own! And I froze some for later this year.

Junk food

I feel like we've been doing a lot better with this one. I broke down and got some from book club but other than that we've been doing great.

So far we have had 3 bags of small trash in the kitchen and 2 large ones in the bathroom. The bathroom has Baby X diapers too though, so I don't have complete control over it, and I feel like this is pretty good considering that we've had three parties/get togethers at our home. The next thing I'm going to try to work on is getting a compost going since this apartment does have one.