Today was day 1 of my first month long experiment so I decided to take it easy and not to do anything too complicated.  Therefore, I made lunch the night before (pesto tortellini), put it in some tupperware and recycled the cardboard box.  Then I made coffee in my french press and set aside the coffee grinds for composting (once I figure out how to actually do that I’ll let you know).  Lastly I filled up the Nalgene with water and put some butter mochi in tupperware for good measure.  All in all a pretty standard setup for work-lunch, no big surprises.

No big surprises until lunch time actually.  I normally will grab a handful of plastic knives and forks from the cafeteria at work and then keep them at my desk for when I bring in my own lunch.  With today being my first day of this new challenge I decided it would be pretty hypocritical of me to use plastic utensils for lunch.  I asked around and none of my coworkers had proper silverware so I had to use my hands.

Getting pasta sauce all over my keyboard was kind of a pain but I got it done, no trash during lunch on day 1 = success.  Let’s just say I already have my metal fork in my bag for work tomorrow.

Later on I came home from work and found these in front of my doorway:

The first thing out of my mouth was “damn”.  I had forgotten about these packages because they had taken so long to arrive.  So obviously they had to show up on my first day of no-trash-month, ugh.  This is what they looked like on my kitchen table, again, damn:

It’s a sleeping bag from Mountain Hardwear (Lamina 35F if you care) which actually came in a recyclable plastic bag and a cardboard box with a QR code talking about recycling cardboard.  Win for Mountain Hardwear.

I was actually stoked about my 2nd purchase as well because it was a stainless steel coffee mug by Stanley and it was designed specifically for bike commuters.  No more spilling coffee all over myself while I’m carrying my bike through the train station or having it leak on me when it’s in my backpack side bottle holder.  Also, the company I ordered it through, TheClymb.com, uses GreenShipping.com which is a cool shipping services that uses carbon offsets to neutralize the footprint of your products shipment to your house.  It’s a very cool service that will likely get it’s own blog post at some point this month.  Anyway, the outcome was actually pretty weak-sauce.  The cup is only stainless steel on the outside, it’s plastic on the inside.  That was the opposite reason of why I bought this mug, I’m not really into pouring lava-hot coffee into a plastic container so it can then leach into my body over time.  I’d rather use stainless steel.  Also, the packaging was not recyclable.  Wtf, come on theclymb.com you’re like 80% the way there just by using greenshipping.com, the next step is to use recyclable plastic in your packaging.  Anyway, I might return this product anyway because it wasn’t want I wanted, so perhaps I can escape this accidental trash that came into my life.

Lastly I made a trip to Shaws for some eats for the week, but that adventure might deserve a separate blog post…