Recyclable =/= sustainable

Late last year, I subscribed to the One5C newsletter, which drops tidbits of climate news and tips for lowering my carbon footprint in my email inbox twice a week. Some of this info is useful, but occasionally the editors make silly mistakes about things that would have been easy to check. One recent newsletter called "natural gas" a misleading term invented by fossil fuel companies "to confuse consumers" when it's actually been used since the 1820s to refer to methane gas that's naturally occurring, as opposed to synthetic. (Consumers may indeed be confused because they mistakenly assume "natural" means "wholesome," but that doesn't mean the term itself is inaccurate.) Another touted a proposed law it said would require schools to provide nondairy milk "for any child that wants it—no note required," when the bill in question actually would require students to provide a note identifying the "disability" that prevents them from drinking cow's milk. And a third recommended bidets on the grounds that they save water, a claim I debunked last year.

Having run across problems like these before, I was a bit wary of One5C's recommendation for Ball's new aluminum party cups. I didn't doubt the editors were technically right in claiming that these aluminum cups are "infinitely recyclable," while "Classic red Solo cups...are #6 plastic, which few facilities recycle." But I wasn't prepared to assume this automatically made the aluminum ones the more ecofrugal choice. After all, the widely demonized single-use plastic bag actually does a lot less damage to the environment than a single-use paper bag or even an organic cotton tote bag. How could I be sure these new aluminum cups were really the most sustainable choice—both economically and environmentally?

To tackle these questions, I started out by shopping around in the "disposable tableware" section on Target.com. There I found several alternatives, some marketed as green and some not. First, as a baseline, I looked at the 18-ounce red Solo cups the One5C editors alluded to. These cost $8.99 for 72, or 12.5 cents each. Target also has its own brand of plastic cups that cost only $5.89 for 72, or 8.2 cents each. Both brands are made of polystyrene (#6 plastic), which isn't typically recyclable, just as One5C claims.

One product marketed as a greener alternative is Repurpose compostable cups. These clear plastic cups hold 12.2 ounces and cost $7.99 for 20 (40 cents each). That's more than three times the cost of the Solo cup and nearly five times the cost of the store brand in exchange for a questionable environmental benefit. The bioplastic these cups are made from has a lower carbon footprint than petroleum-based plastic, but it also uses more land, produces more pollution, and depletes the ozone layer more. Even the cups' claim to be "compostable" is dubious; bioplastics will break down in a commercial composting facility, but not in a home compost bin.

Compared to the Repurpose cups, the new Ball aluminum cups seem at first glance like a more legitimately sustainable alternative. Unlike most plastics, aluminum really can be recycled indefinitely, and aluminum recycling really does save significant resources and energy. Unfortunately, the cups themselves are not recycled; they're made from virgin aluminum, which has a significantly higher environmental footprint. In fact, a life-cycle analysis by Upstream found that these single-use aluminum cups are much worse for the environment than plastic ones, using 47% more energy and producing 86% more emissions. They also have by far the largest footprint in terms of cost. At $5.29 for 10, each cup costs 52.9 cents, more than four times as much as that "classic red Solo cup" and more than six times as much as the store brand.

Clearly, there's no good reason to recommend the Ball aluminum cups over traditional plastic ones. It only took me a few minutes of research to figure that out, and I'm a bit annoyed at the editors of One5C for not doing even that minimal amount of due diligence before recommending them. But what annoys me much more is that they're recommending a single-use product at all. Surely we all know by now that the slogan "reduce, reuse, recycle" puts recycle last for a reason, and that there's almost always more environmental benefit to reducing and reusing when you can.

And in this particular case, there's a very obvious reusable alternative that doesn't cost a cent. If you're having a gathering at your home, using your own cups and glasses costs nothing and creates no waste, aside from a little bit of water and energy for washing. In fact, I went to a potluck this weekend, and the host did exactly that. She served the meal with reusable glasses, reusable plates, and metal utensils, all of which worked much better than flimsy disposable equivalents.

And if you don't have enough glasses for that many guests? Well, if you plan on throwing parties often, it could be worth investing in a dozen 16-ounce mason jars, sold elsewhere on the Target website for $13.49, or $1.12 each. They'd be a better deal than the Ball aluminum cups after just three uses. Even compared to the cheapest plastic ones, they'd pay for themselves after 14 uses. They can accommodate both hot drinks and cold ones. And while the Upstream life-cycle analysis didn't look specifically at glass cups, a separate one by the UN's Life Cycle Initiative found that they're one of the greenest alternatives in just about every situation.

The moral of the story? It's not simply that reuse trumps recycling, although that is the case more often than not. It's that it's worth doing your homework rather than just assuming a product is ecofrugal, or even eco-conscious, just because it's recyclable. If there's an existing life cycle analysis out there, it will only take you a few minutes to find it, and it could save you from a costly mistake—for you and for the earth.

Ecofrugal episodes, July 2025

Time for another exciting installment of ecofrugal episodes, in which I fill you in on all the little things that have been going well and not so well in our ecofrugal life. This past week or two has had a mix of both, so I'm doing the post in "hits and misses" style.

Hit: Our first trip to Savers

Last weekend, Brian and I went to visit my sister and her family in Boston. One of the things we did there was visit Savers, a for-profit thrift store chain we don't have in our area. (There's a store in the same family, called Thrift Superstore, in Union, but that's a good 40 minutes away.) The store has a good selection and decent prices, but no dressing rooms, so we had to either try things on as best we could in the aisles or take our best guess about the size. Brian got one pair of jeans and a new pair of Ren Faire shoes, since his current set (also thrifted) has proven insufficiently supportive for a long day of walking. I got one fairly cute top and a pair of warm tights for winter. (It's not clear how big a hit that purchase is, since I still don't know if they fit. I couldn't try them on in the store, and after we got them home it was too hot. But for only a couple of bucks, they seemed worth the risk.) 

Since my sister's family also brought along four bags' worth of used clothes to donate, they got four coupons good for 40% off on up to $100 worth of purchases and gave one to us. With that discount, our total cost was $26.87 for the four items. That's not breathtakingly cheap, but it's clearly cheaper than buying new, which isn't always the case at thrift shops nowadays.

Miss: A sustainable-living guide that doesn't

On our way back from Savers, we stopped by a farmers' market. One of the booths there was a used-book stall run by the local public library. I can't pass by a table full of books (especially cheap ones) without at least taking a look, and I always like to support libraries when I can, so I spent $2 on a paperback copy of The Self-Sufficiency Bible, by a Brit named Simon Dawson. The cover promised "100s of Ways to Live More Sustainably - Wherever You Are," so I was hoping there might be at least a handful I didn't already know about.

Unfortunately, like many books on this topic, this one proved to be a mix of things I already do and things that aren't relevant to me. The three chapters on "The Home Dairy," "Livestock," and "Meat Preparation and Basic Butchery" were of no use to us at all. The chapter "Curing and Preserving" wasn't completely irrelevant, because the instructions for preserving meat were interspersed with pointers on pickles, chutneys, sauces, jam, and dried mushrooms and herbs. But most of this was already familiar to us, as was everything in the chapter "The Home Baker." And parts of the chapter "The Kitchen Garden" were clearly aimed at a British audience and didn't apply to us, like the advice that tomatoes and peppers are "likely to disappoint you" if you try to grow them outdoors. 

There were also a few tips that didn't seem to fit the "self-sufficiency" brief. The chapter on "Natural Solutions: Health, Beauty, and the Home" contained numerous recipes for natural cleaners and beauty products made from ingredients that you clearly can't produce yourself and aren't cheap to buy, such as cocoa butter, sandalwood oil, and avocado. His homemade hair conditioner recipe ("beat an egg either with an avocado or a banana") would cost a minimum of $1.16 per application, while my Suave conditioner costs around 9 cents. 

Also, the few chapters that looked like they'd be most useful, like "Arty Crafty Bits," largely glossed over the details of the things I was keenest to learn about. The section on knitting lists all kinds of things you can make this way, but never actually talks about how to do it; the section on making your own clothes advises you to "buy a good, lightweight machine...and get sewing," as if setting the machine up and threading it and using it required no explanation. And on top of this, the book is peppered with errors, both mechanical ("it's" for "its," "forraging") and factual (saying that rhubarb leaves are unsafe to compost, describing wood as a green energy source).

Despite these drawbacks, I did manage to glean a few useful tidbits from this book. I learned (and confirmed from reliable sources) that it's best to water seedlings before transplanting them so you lose less soil; that you can make an alcoholic "turbo cider" from store-bought juice in a couple of weeks; that you can knit with strips of fabric rather than yarn; that the comfrey plant growing next to our recycling bin can be eaten (in moderation); and that you can preserve mushrooms at home by air-drying or freezing. But having filed away those facts, I don't see any need to keep the book on my shelf for future reference. I'll either donate it to our library book sale or drop it into one of our town's many Little Free Libraries so it can go to someone who may get more use out of it.

Hit: DIY shower indicator buttons

When Brian and I bought new shower control knobs nine years back, they came with little plastic "indicator buttons" to identify the hot, cold, and direction knobs. These weren't truly necessary, since most people know which is which, but they served to cover up the mounting screws. Unfortunately, within a year, these buttons started to fall apart. They wouldn't stay in place because the little teeth that held them in the knobs had come loose and begun to fall out. This looked like an easy fix; we just bought a new set of indicator buttons for about $5 and swapped them out. But within another year or so, these buttons also began to fall apart in exactly the same way. I looked for metal indicator buttons that I thought might be more sturdy than the plastic ones, but I couldn't find any to fit our faucets.

So, with two of our faucet knobs now sitting there naked and the third button hanging on by a thread, I started brainstorming ways to rig up a DIY version of these buttons. I considered metal bottle caps, but we don't tend to buy drinks in glass bottles, and I wasn't sure how I'd get them to fit into the faucets. I also thought about gluing some decorative beads in place, but that would make it impossible to get at the screws. Finally, I concluded that the best fix would be a couple of large metal washers tucked under the screws. This would leave the heads exposed, but it would hide the dingy, mineral-stained surface underneath. And if the washers themselves got dirty, I could easily remove, clean, and replace them.

I found two washers in our collection that were just the right size and painted them with nail polish: red, which I already had, for the hot-water tap and blue, which cost me $4 at the local discount store, for the cold. It was the work of a couple of minutes to remove the screws, thread the washers on, and screw them back in. With these in place, the damaged knobs look much more presentable. And whenever that last button gives up the ghost, I can give the middle knob the same treatment.

Miss: Shaky sunglasses repair 

On sunny days, I wear special sunglasses designed to fit over my regular glasses. They're much cheaper than a pair of prescription shades, and they're easier to put on and take off because I don't need to stash my other glasses. Their weak point, it turns out, is durability. This month, the frames cracked right across the top. Brian thought maybe he could mend them with epoxy, but the difficulty would be figuring out how to clamp them while the glue dried. I decided instead to shell out $2 for some fast-drying superglue from the discount store and try to fix them that way. I laid them out on a sheet of newspaper, put on gloves so I wouldn't glue my fingers together, dabbed on a little glue, and held the joined area in place for about a minute to let it set.

At first, this simple repair seemed to be holding. Then the crack opened back up, but only partway. I glued it again, but after a week, it popped open completely. I got out my tools and glued it one more time, but this time there was a slight mishap; I got a bit of glue on my glove, which then got stuck to the inside of the nose piece. I was able to pull most of the nitrile off, but there's still a little scrap of blue there that will have to be scraped off with a utility knife. And it remains unclear whether this second repair will hold any better than the first. If it doesn't, I'll have to move on to more complicated methods: either adding a splint along with the glue, as suggested at Eyeglass Repair USA, or plastic welding.

Miss: High quotes for heat pumps 

Last month, in the wake of a brutal heat wave and the passage of a bill that will kill home electrification credits at the end of this year, Brian and I took another stab at getting quotes for a home heat pump. Three weeks ago, after talking to two contractors and getting one quote back, I was feeling doubtful. Now, after five consultations and four quotes (the fifth one never got back to me, even after a follow-up call), I'm even more pessimistic. 

The bottom line seems to be that a system that can completely replace our gas boiler will cost well over 30 grand. That doesn't include the $10,000 decarbonization credit that the first contractor mentioned, but that's because none of the other contractors I spoke to believed that this credit actually exists. More than one of them said that PSE&G has been talking about such a program for years, but nothing has ever happened, and there's no evidence that this year will be any different.

Now, if we were willing to settle for a hybrid system—one that would supplement rather than replace the boiler, reducing our gas usage—we could probably do that for between 20 and 25 grand, including the upgrades to our electrical panel. But that's still a lot of money, and the new system would probably cost as much to run as our current one, if not more. So the costs would continue to pile up every year.

What I'm starting to wonder is, if we're only going to reduce, not eliminate, our use of fossil fuel for heating, do we even need to install a whole-house system? Maybe we could just replace our old through-the-wall air conditioning unit with a heat pump that could provide supplemental heating as well as cooling. It looks like we could buy one for around $1,000, and since it would be replacing an existing unit, the installation cost shouldn't be more than another grand; we might even be able to install it ourselves. We'd still need to use the gas boiler, but the heat pump could probably cut our gas use by half, and for less than one-tenth the price of a complete system. It would be like the heating equivalent of our little induction burner: not a full replacement for a gas appliance, but one that can take over most of its duties for a fraction of the price. Am I crazy, or is this the ecofrugal way?

Recipe of the Month: Green Bean and Mushroom Curry

First, a quick apology for the late post this week. We were away for the weekend and didn't get home until Sunday evening, by which time we had no energy left for anything productive.

Now, on to the meat—or rather meatless—of the post. Brian found July's Recipe of the Month the way he often does: by searching online for a dish he can make with whatever we happen to have in the fridge. In this case, that was a half-pound of mushrooms and a roughly equal amount of green beans from the garden (our first of the season). Running a search based on those two ingredients, he hit on this Green Bean and Mushroom Curry from a site called Cooking with Mum, which bills itself as "a collection of authentic recipes from Fiji." So we can now add Fijian to the list of world cuisines we've sampled.

Well, sort of, anyway. As usual, Brian had to make a few modifications to the recipe based on our dietary needs and what we had available. He left out the optional curry leaves, the Thai chili, and cilantro, none of which we had on hand. He used only half the volume of green beans the recipe called for, since that was all we had, and he didn't bother blanching them. He reduced the amount of oil from half a cup, which seemed a bit excessive, to a quarter-cup, and substituted cheaper canola oil for olive oil.  He added half a teaspoon of salt, since the original recipe called for none at all. And lastly, he gave the dish a boost of protein by cubing up 8 ounces of firm (or at least firm-ish) tofu, sauteing it with a quarter-teaspoon of salt, and tossing that in at the end before serving the whole thing up over brown rice. After all these changes, what he finally put on the table was more like an adaptation of the original Fijian dish than a faithful translation.

In its edited form, this dish was not particularly inspiring. Despite the large variety of spices included in the recipe, it wasn't all that flavorful. Even though Brian had added salt to it, we both ended up adding more and couldn't imagine how flat it would have been with none at all. Perhaps if he'd been able to include the missing chili and curry leaves, or if he'd sprung for the half-cup of olive oil instead of a quarter-cup of canola, that would have made all the difference. But I have a little trouble believing that. 

But though this curry wasn't remarkable, it wasn't bad either. The flavor didn't knock our socks off, but the dish was still reasonably enjoyable, and, with the addition of the tofu,  substantial enough to fill us both up. And even with the reduced volume of green beans, it made enough for two dinners and two lunches. It isn't necessarily worthy of a place in our recipe collection, but it served its purpose: turning the odds and ends into our fridge into a reasonably satisfying meal.

Taming the hell strip

Ever since we bought this house, Brian and I have been trying to reduce the amount of grass on the property—particularly in the little boxed-in front yard. We added the three plum trees, each with its own little island of mulch. We created a bed of day lilies along the cinder block wall. We made several attempts to get a ground cover established in the other portions of the yard, with varying degrees of success. And last month, Brian announced that he'd like to remove the grass from an area I'd never really thought about before: the narrow slice of turf between the sidewalk and street, which is apparently even more of a nuisance to keep mowed than the rest of the yard.

He wasn't quite sure what he wanted on this little sliver of land, aside from "not grass," so I offered to do a little research. I learned, first of all, that this narrow plot is commonly known as the "hell strip," and second, that it's a tricky area to landscape. Plants need to be narrow enough that they won't impinge on the sidewalk and tough enough to survive with very little soil underfoot. And in our yard, they face the additional challenges of heavy clay soil, full afternoon sun, and hungry deer and groundhogs. After consulting several sources online to see what could stand up to this environment, I proposed a mixture of salvia and rudbeckia (Black-Eyed Susans), with maybe a few little thyme plants to fill in the gaps. We already had salvia seeds from our planter project, so we bought a packet of rudbeckia seeds (as well as one of English lavender, which happened to catch Brian's eye), and I figured we'd plant them in the spring.

But this weekend, Brian decided he didn't want to wait that long. With an extra free day from the holiday weekend, he wanted to tackle a project he could see through from start to finish. He started sketching out some plans on Friday, and on Saturday morning he was out there turfing out the sod from the hell strip. He didn't do the whole thing, just a 12-foot section starting at the edge of the driveway. Then he disappeared into the shop and emerged with a small, odd-shaped bracket he'd built out of some pressure-treated 2-by-4 lumber he had leftover from the planter project. This little lopsided trapezoid was just the right size to fill in the angle formed by the driveway apron, turning the rest of the hellstrip into an even rectangle.

Next to that, he began laying out a small paved area that would serve as a landing pad for our trash and recycling bins. We didn't have any groundcloth to keep weeds out, but we had some heavy paper leaf bags that had proved equally effective at weed suppression in our garden paths. Laid flat, the bag was exactly wide enough to fill in the strip. Brian then began covering it with the last of the pavers leftover from our patio project, which had spent the last several years stashed in the shed. After filling in the cracks with fine sand (from a bag we acquired so long ago we've forgotten what it was originally for, he boxed in the remainder of the strip with more lengths of 2-by-4 and filled it up with topsoil. (He didn't nail these pieces together, so whenever he wants to expand the hellstrip planting, he can simply remove the end piece and add more boards to extend the frame.)

By the end of Saturday, he had the entire strip neatly laid out and already looking much better than it had before. However, we knew that if we simply left it like this, it wouldn't stay nice-looking for long. The "grass" (which in our yard really means a mixture of crabgrass and other lawn weeds) would re-colonize the nicely-laid-out bed in short order if we didn't get something else in there. We didn't have time to start a bunch of salvia, lavender, and Black-Eyed Susans indoors, and if we sowed the seeds directly in the midsummer heat, they might not survive. So we decided to stop by the same nursery where we'd bought the plants for our large planters last spring and grab a few deer-tolerant plants to serve as place holders for the rest of the season.

Unfortunately, the nursery was closed, presumably on account of the holiday weekend. We tried the nearby Home Depot, but the only suitable plants we found there were a few salvias, which we already had at home. So we switched to Plan B: digging up and transplanting some of the salvia from our planters, along with any other plants we could scavenge from our flowerbeds. We found one large echinacea that had somehow seeded itself in our herb bed, as well as several smaller ones scattered closer to their parent plants. We also divided off several sections from our largest yarrow plant, since multiple sources had recommended yarrow as a suitable plant for hellstrips. However, the plant was so huge and floppy that we quickly realized the pieces extracted from it would never manage to stand upright on their own. Brian planted a couple of them next to the street sign at one end of the strip with a wire cage around them for support, hoping that once they're in full sun they'll eventually take on a more upright posture. The rest of the bed got filled in with a mixture of salvia and echnicacea and covered with a layer of wood-chip mulch. (We got this free from a neighbor of ours who got a large delivery of wood chips from a tree service and generously offered up the leftovers on Freecycle.)

This newly planted area doesn't exactly look polished, but between the paved area and the layer of mulch, it's fairly neat. Come next spring, we'll start a bunch of echnicea, salvia, and maybe lavender and plant the area more fully. But for now, it's a decided improvement on the "grass" we had there before.