Slaying the Plastic Dragon - Day 6 - Dairy

Butter - this is pretty easy to avoid plastic.*  Just don't buy the tubs!  I love Kerry butter myself.

Milk - Around here there are two stores I know of where you can buy milk in glass bottles.  One is Whole Foods and the other is a local market that is also a CSA and a place where locally produced foods can be bought.  You return the bottles to the store.  Whole Foods will give you $2 back for each gallon bottle.  I'm not sure what the other store gives back.  Glass bottles can be scary because they do seem highly breakable and a potential hazardous mess!  I carefully prop mine among the various grocery bags in my trunk.  When these glass bottles came out years ago when I had young children, I have a vivid memory of dropping one in the parking lot and it smashing all over the place.  I had to go back into the store and tell someone to clean it up.  I just couldn't juggle wiggly children needing to be buckled into carseats and glass milk bottles.  So I have just recently returned to using them again, now that my youngest is 15!

The caps and handles are plastic.  The handles seem pretty permanent though.

Yogurt -I wish I was the type of person to make yogurt.  I even bought a yogurt maker a couple of years ago, but alas it is too many steps from my ADD brain to latch on to and I've just never screwed up courage to try.  I waste so much money (and plastic!) on my aspirations to be more of an Earth Mother type.

Alas, there is a plastic seal around the lid.

So absent making one's own yogurt, how do we get yogurt not in plastic?  Yogurt really is one of the prime offenders anymore, it is packaged in so many forms of plastic from tubes to tubs to great big containers.  I love plain Greek yogurt for breakfast.  I mix in fruit and honey and it's delicious.  I also use it instead of sour cream in chili or on potatoes.  In my search, I have discovered White Mountain Bulgarian yogurt in glass jars which I can find locally at The Fresh Market and Whole Foods.  I am still using up my old yogurt, so I haven't crack the plastic seal on this baby yet.  Stay tuned for further developments!

Cheese - I thought cheese was something that I was going to have to give in on.  You can not get cheese without it being wrapped in plastic!  I'd check out every cheese section of various grocery stores and so. much. plastic!  I did my research at Beth Terry's blog and she said she could get wheels of cheese in wax.  She'd buy a big wheel with friends to share.  Wheels are very expensive!  And it is hard to keep the cheese fresh.

  I looked into finding a specialty cheese shop to help me.  As luck would have it just up the street from where my son takes his flute lessons, there happens to be  gourmet wine and cheese shop.  So on Saturday, S and I went sleuthing.  We were the first customers in the shop when it opened.  The owner was a friendly, smart-aleck kind of guy.  I liked him but he thought I was nuts asking for no plastic with my cheese, please.  I said to him, mankind has been eating cheese for thousands of years, and we've only used plastic for the last 60 or 70.  There's got to be a way!  He said I'd have to go to Europe and that U.S. regulations and the issue of affordability played into it.  But we did find a big wheel of brie cheese that was wrapped in some kind of coated paper.  I don't think the coating was plastic because the paper tore really naturally like paper does.  The whole wheel was over $100 plus we'd never eat that much Brie in a week!  But I did get 1/4 of it.  He said to me: "Don't look!"  while he wrapped the remaining 3/4 of the wheel in plastic.  It was a little bit absurd. So for Saturday night dinner we had brie and french bread.  And for breakfast on Monday we had Brie with jam and crackers (crackers are another hard thing to get without buying plastic.  But I had a lot left over still to eat.)

My expensive crazy experiment in plastic free cheese. (I took this picture from the Lady Gouda blog)

Frustrated by my strike out at the specialty shop, I went home and did more research.  Someone in a comment somewhere mentioned that Whole Foods has some cheeses that aren't wrapped in plastic.  Whoa!  I decided to check this out.  I had promised to take our house guest and her little son to the library on Saturday, and it is right next to the Whole Foods.  So I dropped her off and went sleuthing again. This encounter was better. The guy behind the counter right off the bat said, are you trying to avoid petroleum based products?  I said yes.  He got it right away.  I could have kissed him. I've been getting so many weird looks lately!

They did have three cheeses that are shipped to them in wax, two from England which are cheddar cheeses and one from Spain, a Machego cheese.  I love Machego but the wheel was huge.  Also, practically speaking my family eats cheddar the most.  We have it in grilled cheeses, we grate it up and sprinkle it in our chili and soups, sometimes I cut it up into cubes and we just eat it straight like that.  We eat mac cheese at least a couple times a month.  I probably buy a brick of cheddar every week.  We go right through it.  So I really wanted the cheddar.  One of the cheeses was actually on sale and I got 8% off for buying the whole wheel!  But because it was a speciality cheese imported from England it was extremely expensive to begin with.  I bought it, dear reader, for $66.00!  I figure it will last us 6 weeks at least.  The hard part is going to be figuring out how to keep it fresh that long.  I've got some ideas culled again from Beth Terry's comment section.

The other kind of cheese we regularly eat is parmesan usually grated over spaghetti, soup or salads.  I despaired of finding that anywhere not wrapped in plastic.  However, at Harris Teeter I did find it already grated without the cellulose in a glass jar!  They also had jarred pub cheese in glass.  Maybe one day I'll try that too.

My two other thoughts on cheese are this:  1) Learn to make cottage cheese.  I've heard it isn't hard.  To me cottage cheese is the perfect summer lunch served with fresh tomatoes from the farmer's market.  Maybe I can try it at least once?  2) I've also heard that it may be possible to buy cheese directly from farmers at their markets and some do make goat cheese that is not packaged in plastic.  So when farmer's markets start up again in my area, I will have to check this out.

*Alas, I am learning that many things are coated in plastic.  I am hoping these foil wrappers aren't.

P.S. I have noticed I use the word 'alas' three times in this post.  Apparently, avoiding plastic makes me sigh melodramatically a lot.

Slaying the Plastic Dragon - Day 5 - Bread

Now that I am thinking so much about plastic, grocery stores look different to me.  If you walk the aisles they are nothing but long rows of plastic, plastic, plastic!  How the heck did we feed ourselves before plastic?  Yet, somehow we did!

Bread is a problem.  It all comes in plastic wrappers.  You want some nice soft sandwich bread?  Plastic wrapper.  How about some English muffins for breakfast?  Plastic.  Tortillas to make wraps and quesadillas?  Plastic.

Some people make their own bread.  At various times, I have tried to do this, but alas I really am ADD and have no baking genes at all.  I've tried and failed countless times.  I have a wonderful bread machine that has been collecting dust in my closet.  I even bought a wheat grinder because I was going to buy fresh kernels and make my own.  Hah! Hah! Hah!  I am delusional sometimes.

Either I spent a lot of time and energy making bread that was a flop, or I spent a lot of time and energy making bread that was successful and eaten up in 5 minutes - rendering us breadless once again.

My biggest quest for my particular family is to find acceptable white sandwich bread not in a plastic wrapper and also tortillas for wraps and quesadillas.  I know that whole wheat is better for you, so I do try to buy that kind as well.  My 15 year old, like me, actually prefers non-white bread, but my husband and sons are incorrigible.  How did I wind up with these bumpkins??? (But I love them anyway.)

This will be an on going exploratory process, I can tell.  Here's how I've tackled the problem so far:

I went to an excellent local place, the Great Harvest bakery and sadly their nice white loaf was already in a plastic sleeve.  But for some reason they had not wrapped the 9 grain loaf or the rosemary garlic.  So I got both of those, put them into a cloth bag, brought them home, got out an old huge empty Christmas tin that had once held holiday popcorn and stored both loaves in there.  The bread stayed fresh!  Now this loaf bread is not the right shape for a toaster, but we've been snacking on bread and butter and we've had soup twice this week and I just served nice thick slices of bread with the soup.  The bread, by the way, is extremely yummy and satisfying.

But I needed sandwich bread!  On Friday a.m. I went to Whole Foods and asked over the counter which bread was considered white bread.  The lady told me the Italian.  I said, I want a loaf, please, sliced and here is a bag you can put it into.  No plastic please!  And it worked!  Still not the right shape for toasters, but it was nice and fresh so it didn't really need to be toasted to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

I do think, at some point soon, I am going to take my bread machine out of storage and try to make some sandwich loaf shaped bread again.

One morning I made corn muffins for breakfast.  Jiffy has these cute little cardboard boxes of corn mix.  The inner sleeve is old fashioned wax paper.  They have not changed at all in my lifetime.  I remember my mother buying this brand.  Just add milk and an egg, bake, and you've got some tasty corn muffins.  So Jiffy, thank you for being a keeper!

Continuing my quest for bread without the plastic, I stopped by Harris Teeter which is near where I take my 15 year old to her math tutor.  Lo and behold, they have bulk bread rolls!  You probably can also buy whole loaves over the counter and bring your own bag too.  I didn't bother with that, but I did pick up some of those delicious pretzel sub rolls and some challah rolls.  Harris Teeter provides nice paper bags to put your rolls in.  Other stores don't give you the paper bag option - only plastic.  So thank you Harris Teeter for providing the paper bags.

I still don't have a solution for tortillas.  Maybe we can attempt to make our own?  I think I should talk my teens into attempting it.  The corn tortillas need a tortilla press apparently, but you can make the flour ones without that.

So stay tuned for our ongoing adventures in plastic free bread!

Mr. Midshipman Easy - Book 6

I read this on my kindle.  While the transcription was mostly good, there were some typos.

Mr. Midshipman Easy by Frederick Marryat was published in 1836 and is considered the original British naval novel, the forefather of the Hornblower and Aubrey-Maturin series.  Something I found interesting is that Marryat actually was an officer in the British navy during the Napoleonic wars, yet this novel is light and frothy and doesn't have the depth and history that is included in books by later authors of this genre.

This book tells a long and complicated seafaring yarn about a young man named Jack Easy.  He comes from a wealthy family with eccentric parents.  He himself is pretty incorrigible but smart, kind, adventurous and full of good will when he isn't mixing it up with mischief.  The book is comical with Jack and his friends, Gascoigne and Mesty especially, getting in and out of scrapes.

One of the humorous themes is Jack's father's philosophy of the rights of man and equality.  Jack has grown up on these ideas and this is part of the reason he is so unmanageable, for he takes it to mean he can do whatever he wants.  He naively believes that the Navy is the place where there is true equality.  He is told this by his distant cousin Captain Wilson who is trying to get him out from under the influence of his zany parents.  So Jack goes to sea with Captain Wilson and has many adventures, does many naughty things, fights banditti and duels, falls in love with a girl from Malta and all along the way he's got a couple of paternal superiors watching over him, including the governor of Malta.  Everywhere Jack goes he is liked.  He's a quick learner and always gains the best of every situation with his quick thinking.  At the end of the novel, Jack is fully convinced that a more libertarian view of society is much closer to the truth!

One character in the novel is quite interesting.  Mesty (short for Mephistopheles) is an Ashantee prince from Africa who was captured and sold into slavery.  He learned English working the docks of New York from the Irish there.  He found out that there was no slavery in England so he stows away on a British ship.  Alas, he finds he does not like being the lowest member of a ship's crew where he must boil water for everyone.  He's a proud prince of his own nation!  He takes to Jack because of his talk of equality, but once Jack and he receive promotions, he begins to change his tune.

There are many complicated adventures, much fighting and daredevil antics, but all turns out well in the end for our hero.  The tone of the novel is often tongue in cheek.  It is a light and enjoyable read with lots of nautical terminology.  I am glad I read it.

This book fulfills the 'seaworthy' square in my bingo blackout challenge.

For more book reviews, go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.

Slaying the Plastic Dragon - Day 4 - Peanut Butter

This post is part of an ongoing series on my humble attempts to avoid plastic, especially single use, disposable plastic.  See this post about why I am trying to do this.

Have you noticed how all the peanut butter jars are now plastic?  Some of the organic ones are glass, though.  But my family refuses to eat organic peanut butter.  They want the processed kind that doesn't separate with that oil floating on top.  I've tried buying organic peanut butter before and I am the only one who winds up eating it.  And I am not a huge peanut butter eater like my husband and sons.  Inevitably my husband winds up going out and getting a gigantic plastic jar of Jif or Skippy.

I tried doing some research on line and thought I had found that Smucker's still used glass jars.  It said 'natural' on the label but I thought it would be like the Jif 'natural' that doesn't separate.  But woe is me, even though it was indeed in a glass jar, it was truly natural and did need to be mixed.  Since we were actually out of peanut butter, (I am tackling this problem of plastic one item at a time as they come up in my own life) I brought it home anyway and tried mixing it with the immersion blender in the jar.  This was a bit messy and didn't really mix well.  Also, I broke the blender!  I think I will have to go to the messy trouble of scraping it out of the jar, mixing it in a bowl and then putting it back.  I put it in the fridge upside down to keep it mixed (as much as it was mixed), but no one likes cold peanut butter!

Also, even though the Smucker's come in glass with a tin lid it did have a plastic seal around it.  I am finding this is so with lots of jarred things.  Sigh.  At least it is less plastic and hopefully somewhat recyclable.  So far, things aren't looking hopeful in my quest for peanut butter-in-a-glass-jar-that-will-actually-be-eaten-by-my-family.*  And this is important as my 18 yo is a vegetarian and depends on peanut butter a lot.  You would think being a vegetarian he'd be more open to the organic kind, but no, he is not.

I have a difficult family in some ways.

On the bright side, it is pretty easy to get jelly and honey in glass jars.

This is my favorite local honey.

* I wrote this a couple days ago.  Yesterday, a Friday in Lent when you can't eat meat, we had good old peanut butter and jelly for lunch.  I had taken the Smucker's out of the fridge and even at room temperature with the jar right side up, it stayed mostly mixed.  I did stir it around a bit with the knife I was using for spreading before making the sandwiches.  I must say that Smucker's makes a delicious peanut butter.  The flavor is fresh and peanutie.  I am feeling hopeful that my persnickety family will come around to this peanut butter by the end of Lent!

Slaying the Plastic Dragon - Day 3 - Coffee and Tea

I have been buying Fair Trade coffee from Trader Joe's for a few years now.  My supply was running low and I needed to restock, however, those canisters all have plastic lids.  Was there a way to avoid this?  I noticed in the movie Bag It one of the people being interviewed bought coffee in a paper bag.  We have a fairly new grocery store called The Fresh Market near us.  It is like a swanky Trader Joe's.  It is pretty expensive so I only go there rarely.  But I wanted to check them out again for another reason (because they only sell their meat from the butcher counter.  In other words, there is no pre-packed meat wrapped in Styrofoam and plastic.  You have to request the meat from the guy behind the counter.  Sometimes I go there just to get their MSG free, house made sausage which is truly delicious.)  Anyway, I remembered that they sold coffee in bulk.  So I went and sure enough they have lots of types of coffee in various barrels.  I chose their breakfast blend.  I ground it up there (I don't have a coffee grinder) and used the nice simple brown paper coffee bags the store provided.  The coffee was 11.99 a lb which is pretty darn expensive.  However, the coffee is delicious and no plastic was involved.  So I could just drink less coffee to spend less.  I think though I will try to hunt around and see if I can find bulk free trade* coffee (maybe even organic!) at a lower price.

At my local store, it was 11.99 and I did not see any fair trade bulk coffee either.

The worst development lately that I've noticed is Keurig coffee makers.  Now they've got single serve coffee in these plastic pods.  What the heck?  Why is this considered a good thing?  Come on, First World people, we are getting absurd in our idolization of convenience here!

Please avoid these foolish, costly wastes of resources and pollution!

And now tea is being sold like this too, or instead of using the traditional tea bag, they are using nylon ones?  What gives????  And if you want to find loose tea to make tea the old fashioned way?  Forget it.  It is really hard to find a tin of loose tea these days in your regular grocery store!  I mean to try at the nearby ethnic foods market, to see if they have some.

This is actually one of my favorite teas, but each tea bag is separately wrapped in plastic!  Buh bye!

And even wonderful teas like Celestial Seasons puts a plastic wrapper around the recycled cardboard box.  I have not discovered a solution for this problem yet.  All the boxes seem to have plastic wrappers.  But this is a small enough amount of plastic that perhaps can be recycled.  The Republic of Tea company sells its tea in cute little tin canisters.  However, the canister's lid has an inner ring that seems to be made of plastic.  They are a bit pricier too than other teas.  But you could reuse the tin for other things.

I just did a little research on tea, because it really seems that the solution to having tea without the plastic is to use loose tea leaves in an old fashion tea pot or metal tea infuser.

What I am finding a little bit discouraging is all the sleuthing and driving around one has to do to avoid plastic.  I mean, it eats up a lot of gas which is not good either!  I am hoping once I develop systems, I can get more efficient and therefore more environmentally friendly in my daily habits.  If I have to go to different stores maybe they can be right on my way to a place I am going anyway.  Or maybe I can park at a central location and just walk to various places to buy specific items.  Sigh.  It's day three and I am already feeling a bit weary.  Maybe I need a cup of tea.

*My husband thinks the Free Trade label is mostly bunk; just a marketing tool and a way to raise prices.  I've read articles that are pro and con.

Slaying the Plastic Dragon - Day 2 - Dish Washing

Warning!  This is a chatty prelude to how I figured out how to avoid plastic dish washing liquid bottles!

  We actually have stopped using our dishwasher.  I am, in a way, ashamed to admit to spending money on it. We have a not that old GE Profile.  It's fancy-schmancy, stainless steel.  The people of House Hunters would gush over it.  I was excited when we got it because we had suffered for years with a very noisy dishwasher that sometimes decided to flood and didn't seem to get the dishes very clean, even though I was very good at rinsing them thoroughly.  Well, this newer dishwasher is very quiet.  It also takes an absurdly long time to run a normal cycle and the dishes still didn't get very clean (at least not to my standards!).

Then I read an article that explained why your clothes and dishes don't seem to get very clean anymore.  It is because of environmental regulations on the types of detergents, water usage and temperature, etc.  Ah ha, I thought.  It is not just me imagining things! (As someone who cares about the environment, I think it is absurd to waste electricity and resources building machines that then aren't very useful!).

In the meanwhile we have a long term house guest staying with us from Cote D'ivoire, a west African country located next to Ghana.  She mentioned that no one in her country uses dishwashers.  If they do happen to have a dishwasher they just use them mostly as big drying racks.  She said, it takes so long to wait for clean dishes and they don't seem that clean anyway.  It's a waste of electricity.  Now we are a household of 7 people currently.  My husband and I, my 21 and 18 year old sons and my 15 year old daughter, plus our houseguest and her little toddler.  Back when I had five little children around, I don't think I could have faced hand washing dishes.  I wasn't made of tough stuff!  But now that everyone is older, hand washing dishes seems easier.  Not that my kids really do much washing up!  They are spoiled!  I should make them pull their own weight!  But truth be told, my husband and 21 year old are out at work all day so really they only eat in for dinner and even then, not always. They are not big mess makers.  That leaves just 5 to really clean up after.

My houseguest loves to help out around the house, so we've started a pattern that has been established for a couple months now.  I wash up the dishes in the a.m. and she washes up at some point in the late afternoon.  I often come down to dinner dishes left in the sink to be cleaned in the morning, but I am fine with this.  I have a morning routine.  First I feed the pets.  Then I make coffee and pray and read for a bit.  Then I check email and twitter.  Then I put on a Great Courses video lecture series (I am working my way through The Foundations of Western Civilization taught by Professor Noble of the University of Notre Dame*).  These lecture are 30 minutes long.  I prop up my laptop next to the microwave, don my rubber gloves and commence to wash.  First I take everything that has been dumped into the sink out.  I take an old plastic bowl from a by-gone lettuce spinner and I fill it with soapy water and dump all the cutlery in that to soak.  Then I scrub all the pots and pans and stack them in the dishwasher.  Then I rinse the sink and fill it with soapy water and wash the plates, bowls, glasses and cups, rinse and stack them in the drying rack on the counter over the dish washer.  Lastly, I rinse the cutlery and stack it either in the dishwasher or drying rack.  This usually takes no more than the length of a lecture.  Because I am listening to it, the time flies by and I am pleasantly distracted from my chore.  I've always enjoyed splashing in warm water anyway.

Now I know not everyone has the luxury of 30 minutes in the a.m. to hand wash dishes.  I've been there!  I am in a season of my life where I can do it.  Every life has its seasons!

Anyway, back to being plastic free!!!!  So I usually buy the dishwashing liquid from Trader Joe's in a plastic bottle.  But if I want to avoid plastic, what could I do??

I've been researching lots of plastic free options and Life without Plastic is a great resource.  Beth Terry is the giant on whose shoulders I am standing.  She pioneered trying to live plastic free and has done lots of research.  On her blog someone suggested just using a bar of Dr. Bronner's Castille soap.  So I bought one (I happened to be at Whole Foods, but you can purchase these at many different stores) that had citrus in it because I figured it would help cut any grease.  It is true that you don't get the suds you get with the liquid soap, but it gets everything sparkling clean.  There is no soapy residue.  When I fill up the sink with hot water, I shake the cake of soap around a bit to get the water nice and soapy.  When I need extra soap on my sponge, I simply wipe it a few times over the cake of soap sitting in a saucer by the sink.

My other plastic free go to is the lowly Brillo pad.  I don't bother to buy the brand name, just the lowly knock offs.  These are good for when you really need to scrub.  They come in a cardboard box and are made out of steel wool.  I got mine at my local Giant.

The sponges I am currently using are the flat dehydrated kind that Trader Joe sells.  They are made from vegetable cellulose apparently. They do come wrapped in plastic.  I bought a bunch, so I am going to wait until they are used up before I figure out how to get new sponges without any plastic whatsoever.  Every once in a while I throw these sponges into the washing machine when I wash my dish towels.

I know most people do want to use their dishwasher.  So if you do, Trader's Joe does sell powdered dishwasher detergent in a green cardboard box with a metal spout. It works as well as the other liquid detergents that are sold in plastic jugs.  I know because before I converted to TJ's detergent, I used Cascade simply because it was the brand my mother always bought.  But when I switched to TJ's I actually thought it did a better job cleaning.  I am assuming you can find other brands that are made of biodegradable packaging.  And I personally can't understand the need for those pods they are marketing now which I think always come in plastic tubs anyway.

So that's my new plastic free dishwashing habit!

*Buy Great Courses video series when they are having one of their frequent sales.  You can pay as much as 70% off these prices.)

Slaying the Plastic Dragon - Day 1 - Prepping the car

It's Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, when Catholics (and others) make sacrifice, prayer and almsgiving priorities as we journey to the high holy holiday of Easter.  One thing I've decided to give up is plastic! See my previous post about giving up plastic for Lent.

My first basic steps in reducing our plastic use has to do with prepping my car:

1)  Keep car stocked with reusable shopping bags.  I just plan to leave a bag of bags in the trunk.  I then have to remember to bring them into the store when I shop.  I've noticed I'll remember when I am shopping for food, but I usually don't even think about it when shopping at other types of stores.  The other hard thing to remember is to put the bags back in the trunk after I'm done unloading groceries or whatever else.  So it is a (fairly) new three step habit to get into:  a) put bags in trunk b) remember to take into stores with me 3) remember to put bags back in trunk!

By the way, I got a free bag from these folks.  What a neat community project!

(NB:  Even better!  I've discovered 2 bags I have fold up small enough to comfortably fit in my purse.  Even in my effort to remember bags since last Friday, I actually forgot at one point, but then realized I'd put one in my purse!  Ta da!  Man these little habits are truly hard for me.  Is there something wrong with me????)

2)  I need to remember to keep a water bottle with me.  I am out a lot and need to drink lots of water.  So it should be a regular thing to be taking a newly filled water bottle into the car and then remembering to bring it into the house and wash it, to make it ready for next day's use.  I also need to keep an extra empty water bottle or two in the car just in case any other passengers get thirsty.  I need a place to stow these.  We have about a million cup holders in our mini-van, so this really isn't a problem.  We should learn to fill these when we find a tap we can use or just fill them at fast food places at the soda machine.

I've got the purple one.

We have various water bottles we've collected over the years.  Many are indeed made out of plastic.  I have one expensive one that I bought from Whole Foods several years ago.  It is great EXCEPT I find it hard to get the cap back on quickly.  It is a screw on cap and I have to fight with it a bit to make it twist on evenly.  The plastic water bottles are lighter weight and better for taking on hikes or camping.  We've had a couple of stainless steel water bottles, but I have to admit I do not like the taste of water that has been left in a stainless steel water bottle for a while.  And the bottoms of both bottles got kind of banged up and crushed and one started leaking and the other is so uneven at the bottom it doesn't stand up well on its own.

3)  Coffee travel mugs - I need to bring my coffee or tea with me if I want coffee while I'm out.  I actually do this about 50% of the time anyway, but I need to make it 100%.  Again, an extra travel mug or two is helpful when passengers want a hot drink too.  I've never done this but I hear you can ask Starbucks to fill your travel mug for you, or at places like Panera where the coffee is out already in thermoses.  I would imagine the only problem is making sure you get the right amount of coffee, so that you aren't paying for a small or tall, but then pouring venti or grande into your mug!  I may have to figure out how many ounces are in a travel mug.  We have collected a variety of mugs over the years.  We have a couple that have lost their caps.  I hear you can order new ones!  That's a good idea!

Even though most of water bottles and travel mugs we have now are made of plastic, I plan to intentionally use them for a long period of time and be conscientious about always having them available or just going without a drink!  (Odds are, I am not going to perish from dehydration or lack of caffeine before I can get back to my own home!).  As I need to replace them, I will try to be more conscientious about the plastic.

Just doing these simple things:  avoiding plastic bags, avoiding take out cups, straws and disposable plastic lids is a huge step in the right direction in reducing plastic pollution.  Everybody needs to try to get into these habits!