Ecofrugal Living podcast #13: The Great Applesauce Jar Switch

Here's the latest Ecofrugal Living podcast, based on the blog entry for October 23, 2014.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Thrift Week 2015, Day 3: Primo Flavorstation (the frugal fizz machine)

Last Wednesday, when I popped outside to take in the mail, I discovered a mysterious package on my doorstep. It was a great big box labeled "26-inch pedestal fan," which confused me completely, because I knew I hadn't ordered anything like that. Getting the box inside and opening it unraveled part of the mystery, as I found a smaller box inside labeled "Primo Flavorstation"—one of the items that's been on my Amazon Wish List for a while. I wrote last summer about how I'd been thinking about getting one of these, but I hadn't taken the plunge because I wasn't sure whether it would last long enough to be cost-effective (since the product, and all its replacement parts, are no longer on the market). Now, it appeared, someone had thrown my cap over the wall for me.

So that explained why I'd received the package, but it still didn't tell me where it had come from. There was no clue in the box—no gift message, no receipt, no packing slip—and the return address on the package was a store I didn't recognize. My first guess was that my mom might be responsible, since I'd steered her to my Wish List when she asked me what I wanted for my birthday, but she disclaimed all knowledge about it. So I sent some inquiries around by e-mail to everyone else I could remember telling about my list, and I managed to trace the gift back to my sister.

That unraveled the mystery of where the present came from, leaving only the puzzle of how to assemble the thing and get it working. Fortunately, the instruction manual was pretty easy to follow. There were several pieces in the box: the machine itself, the CO2 canister (called a "sparkler"), the water bottle with its cap, three separate pumps for dispensing flavor syrups, one spoon for measuring out flavor by hand, and four colorful rubber bands for keeping track of whose water bottle is whose if you have more than one. (I'm not sure whey they bothered with the pumps and the rubber ID bands, since the machine came with only one bottle and no flavor syrups, but perhaps the point was to encourage you to buy more accessories.)

The first step in assembly was to screw the CO2 canister into place on back of the machine. The hardest part was getting the translucent cover off, but once we managed that, it was pretty simple to attach the sparkler. The instructions said to turn the machine upside down to do this, though I'm not sure why—maybe just to keep the heavy canister from slipping loose and falling on your toe before you've got it into place. Once it's in, the cover goes back on.

Next, you fill the bottle with water up to, but not beyond, the fill line (overfilling it can result in too much pressure, which can get a bit hazardous) and screw it into its place on the front of the machine.

Then you just press the button to carbonate. There are actually two buttons on top of the machine that you need to use. The button at the front, with a fingerprint on it, is the one you press to add CO2; you're supposed to hold it down until you hear "three loud buzzing sounds in a row." Then, before removing the bottle, you press the red button on the back to release excess CO2 before unscrewing the bottle.

The first time we attempted this, we never heard the buzzing sounds, and when we released the pressure and tasted the water, it had barely any fizz. The second time, we tried screwing the bottle in a little more snugly, and this time the fizz just foamed right in, producing the "buzzing" noise—something like a foghorn blast—in just a few seconds. It was so startling, in fact, that we completely forgot to press the red button before unscrewing the bottle, and we ended up getting a vivid demonstration of just why it's important to do so. The bottle came loose with a loud pop, like a champagne bottle being uncorked in an echo chamber, and the pressure blew the plastic bottom section right off the machine.

Fortunately, this doesn't seem to be an essential piece, either for function or for safety. It probably adds a little to the stability of the machine, but it works just fine without it for now, and Brian figures he can eventually reattach the piece with a little epoxy glue.

Once we managed to work out all the details, this little fizz machine performed admirably. Its home-carbonated seltzer was indistinguishable from the store-bought stuff, but with four distinct advantages:

1. It's in a little half-liter bottle, so it probably won't go flat before I use it up. And even if it does, no big deal; I can just screw the bottle back onto the machine and add a little more CO2.
2. It's a lot cheaper to make. Since our municipal water bill is on a tier system rather than a flat fee per gallon, the cost of the water itself is negligible unless I use enough of it to bump us up to a higher tier of usage (not very likely). As for the cost of the CO2, the big advantage of the FlavorStation over the more popular SodaStream is that it takes a standard 20-ounce canister, like the ones used for paintball. That means we can get it refilled at a sporting-goods store like Dick's Sporting Goods ($4 per refill) or Sports Authority ($3.50). Reviewers on Amazon estimate that a full canister can carbonate over 200 liters of water, which works out to less than 2 cents a liter. So if I'm currently going through 80 liters a year at an average of 40 cents per liter, this little device can save me about $32 a year just on seltzer. (If I were a soda drinker, I imagine it would save me a lot more.)
3. I only need one bottle. I can just keep refilling it over and over (though not indefinitely, as I discuss below) instead of filling up my recycling bin with empty soda bottles and cans. I suspect just introducing this machine to our lives will, all by itself, cut the rate at which we fill our recycling barrel from once every 2 weeks to once every 3, at least in summertime. Plus we won't have to clutter up the fridge with multiple bottles or cans of seltzer anymore.
4. I won't run out of seltzer again for months, if not years. I used to keep running out of the fizzy stuff and having to dash to the store for more every week or so. Now I can just keep refilling and recharging my little half-liter bottle until the sparkler runs out.

Unfortunately, the FlavorStation isn't perfect. It's better, way better, than buying seltzer at the store, but it has a few drawbacks:

1. When the sparkler finally runs out of CO2, I can't just run out to the grocery store for more. I'll have to take it to the sporting goods store for a refill, which will probably mean waiting for the weekend to make a special trip. But I can always just go to the grocery store and buy a few liters of fizz to tide me over until I get the canister recharged, so that's not a big problem.
2. The machine is a bit large. Right now, we've got it sitting out on the kitchen counter, taking up our very limited food prep space. It's not exactly ugly to look at, but it doesn't really enhance the look of the kitchen, either, and it's definitely somewhat in the way. Unfortunately, it's too tall to fit into most of our cabinets; the only place we've found where it could fit is on the top shelf of the pantry, which isn't a terribly convenient spot for something I'm going to be using often. (With the full CO2 charger in there, it's pretty heavy to be transferring to the counter and back on a regular basis.) So we may need to do a little rearranging of our cabinets to find a good place to store it.
3. The little sport bottle will eventually expire. According to Primo, it shouldn't be used for more than 2 years, because the PETE plastic it's made from will eventually deteriorate until it can't stand up to high pressure anymore. Keep using the bottle after that point, and eventually, BOOM! Water and fragments of plastic all over the place (and possible damage to the machine as well). So I may need to pick up an extra bottle or two on Amazon while they're still available. Or maybe try to rig up some sort of adapter to thread a standard sports bottle onto the FlavorStation.
4. The bottle is not the only part that may soon be irreplaceable. Because the Flavorstation is now discontinued, the only way to get replacement parts for it is to buy another machine secondhand and cannibalize it. It shouldn't matter for the sparklers, since the canister is a standard size, but if anything else breaks, it may be tricky to fix. Then again, a reviewer on Amazon says the machine is "relatively easy to repair" because it has so few moving parts and notes, "I've already had to repair a broken tube internally and it works flawlessly again." So maybe the bottle is the only discontinued part I actually need to worry about.

Still, even with its flaws, this machine is WAY more ecofrugal than buying seltzer at the store. It saves me time (no more seltzer runs), reduces waste (no more plastic bottles), and even if I have to drop $20 on a backup bottle for it, the savings on seltzer will pay for that within a year.

The Great Applesauce Jar Switch

Brian and I are what you might call semi-regular consumers of applesauce. It's not an item you'll always find in our fridge, like it is in some homes (typically ones with small children), but it's our go-to accompaniment for potato pancakes and similar potato-based dishes. So every couple of months, when we have a potato meal on the agenda, I'll stop by the local supermarket to grab a jar of applesauce, which then lingers in our fridge until (we hope) we remember to polish it off before it turns fuzzy. An extra perk of finishing up a jar of applesauce is—or at least used to be—that it leaves you with a nice glass jar, which can be useful for storing all sorts of things, from apple butter and lemon curd to refrigerator pickles to dry beans in the pantry. It also makes an ideal container for carrying soup to work in a packed lunch; unlike our Pyrex bowls, it has a lid that screws on securely, and unlike plastic containers with snap-on lids, it's safe for reheating in the microwave.

Thus it came about that last week, Brian asked me to pick up a jar of applesauce to accompany his Skillet Kugel. When I checked the market, however, I was chagrined to discover that the store-brand applesauce we usually buy was no longer being sold in glass jars; they were all plastic. Moreover, it looked like Stop & Shop was merely following the lead of the name brand Mott's, because all its applesauce was now in plastic jars too. I was baffled. Why, when consumers are increasingly concerned about the health and environmental impacts of plastic, would all the applesauce producers in the country suddenly adopt it instead of glass?

On the face of the matter, it seemed like plastic packaging must fall into the category of "stupid plastic"—the kind that's wasteful and unnecessary compared to other alternatives. But on the other hand, if all the manufacturers had gone to the trouble of switching to plastic applesauce jars instead of glass ones, there must have been some significant benefit to doing so. Curious about what that might have been, I dropped a line to Mott's via its website:

I have noticed that Mott's has recently switched from glass jars to plastic for its applesauce. Store brands seem to have followed suit. I was just wondering when this switch happened and what was the reason for it. With more consumers now shunning plastic due to health concerns, why switch to it?

I wasn't really expecting a response, but to my surprise, I got a call back from a courteous company representative within a couple of hours. She said that the switch from glass jars to plastic for all Mott's applesauce actually happened back in July 2013. However, stores that already had a stockpile of Mott's in the old glass jars would probably have used it up before starting to put out the newer plastic jars, which would explain why the Stop & Shop was still displaying glass ones until recently. As for the reasons behind the switch, she said there were several:

1. Safety. Customers had expressed a preference for plastic because it's non-breakable—a particularly important concern for parents.
2. Easier handling. The plastic jars are both lighter and easier to grip, and many customers find them easier to open.
3. Transportation. The plastic jars are stackable, which means you can pack them more efficiently into trucks and onto store shelves. That, combined with their lighter weight, means that they require less fuel to transport.

It was that third point that really caught my attention. Up until then, I'd been sort of half-assuming that the glass jars, whatever their other disadvantages, were the greener choice. But as the rep pointed out, since plastic jars are lighter, it takes less fossil fuel to transport them to stores, which makes their carbon footprint lower. Low enough to balance out the environmental costs of producing the plastic and recycling it? Ah, well, that's a tricky question to answer. An article on the carbon footprint of packaging at How Stuff Works says it's "still mostly a mystery," largely because "the numbers to answer these types of questions aren't easily accessible for the average person." Likewise, a story in the Philadelphia Inquirer two years ago, comparing the benefits of plastic, glass, and aluminum drink containers, concluded that "Clearly, there's no one best choice for every person or every situation."

So overall, I can't really say that the new plastic jars for applesauce qualify as an example of "stupid plastic." However, I can definitely say that the switch to plastic makes the jars less useful for us, since they're no longer microwave-safe and also not as easy to clean as the old glass ones. So from now on, when we find ourselves in need of applesauce, the first place I check will be not in the canned-fruit aisle, but on the shelf where the store keeps its marked-down produce. If we can pick up a bag of slightly bruised apples for a mere 60 cents a pound, then in less than half an hour, our little pressure cooker can turn them into an applesauce that beats the commercial stuff hollow for half the price. True, we'll end up with a smaller amount than we'd get by buying a whole jar, but that's a good thing; it means we won't have to worry about using up the leftover sauce before it goes bad. And as far as packaging goes, you can't get much more eco-friendly than an apple peel.

[EDIT, September 2025: I found a 2020 analysis by Ecochain that compared the lifetime environmental costs of glass vs. plastic and found that while glass has a lower impact per kilogram, its higher weight makes plastic the more sustainable choice for both jars and bottles. Another study, done in 2008, found a "small but significant" benefit for plastic rather than glass baby food jars. So it looks like if you have to buy your applesauce, plastic really is the more eco-friendly choice.]

Should you go soap nuts?

This week's Dollar Stretcher newsletter included an article on "A Natural and Frugal Laundry Alternative." The words "natural and frugal" caught my attention, so I read on and found that the product being discussed was something called "soap nuts," also called soap berries or wash nuts. According to the distributor, NaturOli, these are the dried hulls of the soapberry fruit, which contain natural saponins, foaming compounds that work just like soap. To wash your clothes with soap nuts, you just put a handful (four or five "nuts") into a little mesh bag and throw it into a hot-water wash. The same nuts can be reused four or five times, and when they start to turn grey or mushy, you can just throw them on the compost pile.

On the face of it, these sound like the most ecofrugal laundry product you can imagine. They're natural and biodegradable, and the article claims they contain "no harmful chemicals or perfumes." They also produce no packaging waste; the muslin bag is reusable, and the nuts themselves can be composted. But what about their cost? The article says that a pound of soap nuts costs $19 at Amazon, but it doesn't say how many nuts are in a pound, so it's impossible to figure out the actual cost per load. The article provides lots of detail about how well the soap nuts clean clothes and how easy they are to use, but the only mention of their cost-effectiveness is an offhand remark about how the soap nuts "could potentially save me money, too!" Considering that the Dollar Stretcher is supposed to be all about "living better for less," this seemed like a pretty big oversight.

So I started digging around to see if I could find any hard numbers on how cost-effective these soap nuts are compared with regular laundry detergents. I checked the comments on Amazon.com and found one enthusiastic review from an owner who carefully tracked her usage to see how long the nuts lasted. She concluded that they used 5.8 ounces of nuts to wash 68 loads of laundry; at $49.95 for a 4-pound package, she found, this "works out to a cost of $.07 per load!" That exclamation point suggests that she considers this a fantastic price, but my own calculations show that our Purex detergent (bought on sale, with coupons, and used much more sparingly than the bottle recommends) actually costs us between 2 and 3 cents per load. That makes 7-cents-a-load soap nuts look a lot less impressive by comparison.

Of course, it's entirely possible that my $1.25 bottle of Purex isn't getting our clothes nearly as clean as the soap nuts would. The Dollar Stretcher reviewer praises the soap nuts' cleaning performance to the skies, saying they removed mud and food stains with ease and left the clothes smelling "clean but not fake, perfume-y clean." She concedes that they weren't quite up to the task of removing a tea stain from a towel, so pre-treatment might still be necessary for "some types of really icky stains." The majority of users on Amazon.com heap praise on the soap nuts as well, saying they do a great job with everything from cloth diapers to grungy work clothes (even those worn for really messy jobs like painting or auto repair). Most users report their clothes come out fresh-smelling and soft, with no need for a separate fabric softener. Only a few reviewers complain that the nuts can't handle tough stains or odors.

Soap nuts also offer some health and environmental benefits over plain old laundry detergent. Various reviewers on Amazon note that soap nuts are compostable, cruelty-free, and hypoallergenic. One user who is allergic to coconut says these are the only decent laundry product she's ever found that contains no coconut derivatives; others say it has cleared up skin problems like eczema that are exacerbated by most detergents. Users also like the fact that these are a natural product, free of the synthetic chemicals in traditional detergent (which one user blames for "cancer, respiratory and skin irritation, and central nervous system damage").

However, these benefits come with an environmental downside: the berries have to be imported from the "pristine Himalayans of India" [sic], so transporting them must require a fair amount of fuel and produce a fair amount of greenhouse gas. On top of that, this natural product isn't generally sold in stores, so buying it probably means ordering online and having it shipped from the processing plant here in the U.S. Of course, as this Worldwatch Institute article on "food miles" points out, simply calculating miles to market isn't a very good way to measure a product's environmental impact, and the fact that these soap nuts have been shipped thousands of miles doesn't necessarily negate their green claims. But it does take at least a bit of the shine off them.

Another problem with the soap nuts, in terms of sustainability, is that they work best when used in hot water. According to the Dollar Stretcher article, using them this way is incredibly simple: just put a handful of nuts in the mesh bag and toss it in with the clothes. However, if you wash most of your clothes in cold water—as recommended by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and most environmental sites—then soap nuts take a bit of extra work. You have to soak the bag of nuts in a cup of very hot water for a few minutes before tossing them into the wash. Some users at Amazon recommend going still further and soaking the nuts for 15 minutes to an hour before washing with them. Obviously, this makes the soap nuts a lot less convenient to use for energy-conscious cold-water washers. (However, to be fair, a couple of users say they don't bother with the pre-soaking step at all and their clothes still come out clean, even in cold.)

So, taking everything into account, how do soap nuts compare to standard laundry detergent? In terms of cleaning power, they seem to be at least equal, and possibly better. They also appear to have the edge in terms of sustainability, with their biodegradability and lack of toxic chemicals outweighing their miles to market. On the other hand, they're less convenient to use in cold water, and switching to hot water for all your washes would probably cancel out all the soap nuts' eco-benefits. But their real fatal flaw is their high cost. At 7 cents per load (a price you can only get by buying in bulk), they may appear to be cheaper than most name-brand detergents, but that's only true if you're paying full price for your detergent and using the full amount. If you habitually use coupon stacking to buy your detergent and then skimp on the amount you use, as we do, you'll pay less than half as much per load as you would with the soap nuts.

Of course, if you have a coconut allergy, or extra-sensitive skin, or your top priority in life is to tread as lightly as possible on the earth, you might consider that money well spent. But if your goal is to save resources of every kind, including your time and your hard-earned cash, then sale-priced detergent is probably a better bet.

DIY deodorant testing

In the latest issue of The Dollar Stretcher, an author who goes by "Olivia W" shares her top three tips for reducing her food bill. One of them is to make as many as possible of her personal hygiene products, such as shampoo and toothpaste. She says her "biggest, simplest change" in this area was switching to plain baking soda, applied with a powder puff, as a deodorant. She considers this a "much healthier alternative to the chemicals found in commercial deodorants," as well as a money saver, and says it "works like a charm."

I found this interesting, because as it happens, I'd tried baking soda as a deodorant myself about six years ago. My primary goal at the time was not to save money, though I hoped that might be a bonus; it was to find a cruelty-free deodorant that actually worked. As I posted to the Dollar Stretcher forum at the time, "Most of the big brands use animal testing, and the few that don't (like Tom's of Maine) tend to be both expensive and not very effective. So I was wondering whether making my own deodorant at home would be a practical possibility."

Knowing that both baking soda and vinegar could be used to deodorize spaces in the home (like the fridge or the garbage pail), I wondered whether they would also work on my armpits. So I did a bit of searching online and found several suggestions for ways to use one or the other:

• plain baking soda, applied with a damp washcloth
• a mixture of baking soda and alcohol in a spray bottle
• a solution of vinegar or lavender oil in a spray bottle
• a mixture of baking soda, corn starch, olive oil, and a nice-smelling essential oil, rubbed into the skin with the fingers

In addition to these, my cohorts on the Dollar Stretcher forum came up with several suggestions:

• cornstarch scented with essential oil, which one user found effective on her very light perspiration
• oil of oregano, diluted with olive oil
• strong sage tea
• tea tree extract
• antibacterial cream, which one user said "works very well, but it's neither frugal nor natural"
• frequent washing
• milk of magnesia (one user said she "had some generic...and decided to try it," and she found it "works wonderful")
• change of diet (various users suggested giving up onions, broccoli, beef, fish, and dairy)
• a mix of alcohol and water, with a few drops of vegetable glycerine and a drop of fragrance oil
• hydrogen peroxide

I started working my way through these suggestions, beginning with the simplest and cheapest. Baking soda, applied with a damp washcloth, didn't work noticeably. Apple cider vinegar, applied with a cotton ball, worked better than the baking soda (and better than the $3 deodorant from Trader Joe's that I'd been using as a stopgap measure), but it couldn't eliminate all odor. I then moved on to full-strength alcohol, applied with a cotton ball; 3% hydrogen peroxide, applied the same way; and alcohol mixed with baking soda in a spray bottle. None of these had any appreciable effect. 

At this point, I'd tried all the ingredients I had ready to hand. Changing my diet seemed like a pretty complicated and uncertain way to deal with the problem, especially if it involved giving up my morning cup of cocoa. I eliminated oil of oregano from the list because a website I consulted warned against it, saying it was too irritating to the skin, even when diluted. That left two untested ingredients that were both available at my local drugstore: tea tree oil, which was $10 for one ounce, and milk of magnesia, which was $4 for a 12-ounce bottle. Not knowing whether either of these would be effective, I decided to go with the smaller investment. It seemed completely bizarre, but it was only about the same price as one tube of deodorant, and if it didn't work, we could still try it out for stomachaches.

Well, to my great surprise, it did work. A little dab of milk of magnesia, applied to the underarms with a cotton ball, actually kept odor at bay as well as most commercial deodorants. Unfortunately, it also had a side effect. When taken orally, milk of magnesia is a laxative as well as an antacid—and I was disconcerted to discover that it seemed to have the same effect when applied topically. I can't explain how this was possible, because I wouldn't expect the stuff to be absorbed through the skin, but after a few days, it became quite clear that the effect was real and not coincidental. So I hastily stopped using it and switched back to my stick deodorant.

At that point, I decided to call a halt to the experiment. Everything I'd already tried had been unsatisfactory in one way or another, and I'd also managed to find a brand of commercial deodorant (Mitchum) that, while not labeled as cruelty-free, was at least not listed as a brand to avoid on the Caring Consumer site. However, this story turned out to have a postscript. A couple of years ago, a friend offered me a bottle of alcohol-based hand sanitizer that she couldn't use because the fragrance bothered her. I'm not a regular user of hand sanitizer (I prefer plain old soap and water when available), but I accepted it thinking it might come in handy for something. And spotting it one day on my dresser, I decided on a whim to try dabbing some under my arms to see how it did as a deodorant. Since the active ingredient in this stuff is alcohol, which hadn't worked for me, I wasn't expecting it to work—but to my surprise, it did. Maybe having it in the form of a gel made it stay put better on my skin, or maybe it was the type of alcohol that was different, but for whatever reason, it actually kept the odor at bay. So, given that it was both much cheaper than stick deodorant and much lighter on packaging, I decided to keep using it.

I've since found that, as a deodorant, alcohol sanitizer has its limits. For one, it's a deodorant only, not an antiperspirant—which isn't really a drawback for me, but it might be for some people. Also, it's not as strong as the Mitchum deodorant. It will keep me odor-free during light activity in moderate temperatures, but not during a vigorous workout or on a very hot day. So now I use sanitizer all through the winter, spring, and fall, and switch to commercial deodorant on the hottest days of summer and on days when I have dance practice. Eked out by hand sanitizer, which you can get at most stores for around $1 a bottle, a single tube of deodorant now lasts me six months or longer. And there's that much less non-recyclable packaging waste ending up in our trash bin. I've taken to carrying a small bottle of the sanitizer around in my purse, where I can grab it to kill odor quickly in a pinch—or even, if the need arises, to clean my hands.

Actual Savings: Soda Machines (Or, Getting my Fizz Fix)

I'm a big consumer of seltzer, especially during the summer months. My usual afternoon snack is a bowl of my microwave-popped popcorn accompanied by an egg cream (that's milk, chocolate syrup, and seltzer, for those of you from the Midwest and other foreign parts). I also enjoy ice cream sodas for a summertime dessert; they use a lot less ice cream than eating it straight, so I can satisfy my sweet tooth with fewer calories and also stretch a half-gallon of sale-priced Blue Bunny further.

As an indulgence, seltzer isn't that expensive; I can usually find it on sale for 50 cents a liter or less. (The two-liter bottles are cheaper still, but when I buy them the seltzer invariably goes flat before I use it all up.) However, I do feel a tiny bit guilty about all the packaging waste my seltzer habit produces. I've never bought any other kind of bottled water, and I've written repeatedly about what a silly waste of money and resources it is, but here I am, still tossing a plastic bottle into the recycling bin every few days (or an aluminum can every day). But unlike plain water, the fizzy stuff isn't available on tap, so what's the alternative?

It might seem like the obvious ecofrugal choice would be to buy one of those newfangled home-carbonation machines, like the SodaStream. Unfortunately, my research indicates that these devices, while they may reduce waste, don't necessarily save money. The most basic SodaStream machine, the Fountain Jet, costs $80 and comes with one 60-liter carbonator. Replacement carbonators cost $15 each. Assuming I now pay 40 cents a liter for seltzer on average, I'd have to consume 420 liters of the stuff to reach the point at which my homemade fizz was as cheap as the store-bought variety. If I go through 3 liters of soda per week, or 78 liters over the course of a summer, it would take over 5 years for my soda machine to pay for itself—assuming it didn't break before then.

The main reason the SodaStream is not particularly cost-effective isn't the initial cost of the machine; it's the high cost of the CO2 refills. There are lots of places to have CO2 tanks refilled: one reviewer of the Fountain Jet on Amazon.com notes that "most paintball shops and some grocery stores" provide this service, and so do many sporting goods stores. The problem is that SodaStream's machines use a proprietary cartridge that won't work with the refilling equipment. A SodaStream competitor called the Primo Flavorstation could take a standard-sized CO2 canister, but it's no longer on the market. There are a few other soda makers on the market, but they all appear to use proprietary CO2 cartridges as well. Cuisinart machines use tiny 3-ounce cartridges that cost $20 a pop and carbonate only 16 liters of water; the Hamilton Beach Fizzini takes single-use CO2 chargers that cost 70 cents each and are good for only one liter. It can also take the standard-sized chargers used in an old-fashioned seltzer bottle, which can be bought in bulk, but even these come to 43 cents each with shipping. In every case, the cost per liter is actually higher than that of the store-bought seltzer, which means there's no way the machine will ever pay for itself.

I'm not the first person to notice this problem, of course, and various companies sell products designed to circumvent it. A company called CO2 Doctor sells a $35 adapter ($40 with shipping) that will let you fit a standard 12-ounce paintball tank into your SodaStream; another company sells a similar adapter called the SodaMod for $60. A 12-ounce CO2 canister can be refilled for about $3 and, extrapolating from the size of the SodaStream canister, should be able to carbonate about 50 liters of water. However, once you factor in the cost of the adapter, plus the cost of the machine itself, you'll still have to drink 360 liters of seltzer before it becomes cheaper than buying it from the store.

So it looks like there's no good way to make a home soda machine truly cost-effective. However, there are other ways to carbonate water at home with less equipment. The My Pop Soda Shoppe system, for instance, skips the CO2 canister altogether and produces its own fizz the old-fashioned way, through fermentation. You just put a cup of sugar and two teaspoons of yeast into one bottle, and as it ferments, it will produce 10 liters of CO2 that are stored in a separate reservoir. From there, you transfer it as needed into a bottle of cold water. Unlike other home soda machines, this one can also carbonate other types of liquid, such as fruit juice or wine. The system costs $75, and the seller claims that the materials needed cost only 2.4 cents per liter. However, if you use organic sugar, as we do, the cost for materials shoots up to 95 cents per batch, or 9.5 cents per liter. That's still a much lower cost per liter than the SodaStream; it would take only about 250 liters, or a little over 3 years, for this system to pay for itself. But during that whole time, we'd go through sugar awfully fast, which would mean making more frequent trips to Trader Joe's. Moreover, this system requires quite a bit more work than most home soda makers (filling, cleaning, and so on).

Another alternative is to put together your own "home carbonation system," as outlined in this Instructables article. The author provides a condensed explanation of how it works right at the start of the article:

Take a 20lb CO2 Tank and regulator, attach a tube, and stick a 99 cent locking ball air chuck (tire inflator) on the end of the tube. Pop a cheap snap-in tire valve (schrader valve) into a plastic soda bottle cap and you're ready to carbonate any liquid in about 30 seconds. Colder liquids absorb more CO2 carbonation.

He estimates that you can get all the parts you need for "around $100, plus the deposit on a CO2 tank," which is another $100 or so. By his reckoning, a 20-pound CO2 tank can carbonate over 1,000 liters of water, which he says works out to less than 2 cents per liter (which presumably means that it costs around $20 to refill the tank). Unfortunately, because of the high initial cost of all the parts, the system wouldn't break even until it was halfway through its first tank of gas. At the rate I drink seltzer, that would take over 6 years—longer than the SodaStream. (This site has testimonials from several users who were able to put together home systems for less, but the cheapest system was $95 total, which means it would still take just over 3 years to pay for itself.)

What I'd really like is a machine like the old FlavorStation, which could work with a standard 20-ounce paintball tank. That way I'd be able to get the tanks refilled at any local sporting goods store, and the whole thing would take up less room (and be less work) than a big 20-pound tank. And the thing is, it's still possible to buy the original FlavorStation from various vendors for around $32.50. If the 20-ounce tank it comes with is good for 85 liters (once again extrapolating from the size of the SodaStream cartridge), then this machine would actually pay for itself on its first tank of gas, or just into its second year of use. And even if my local sporting goods stores refused to refill the Primo CO2 canisters (a problem mentioned by some users on amazon), I could just buy a paintball tank for an extra $20 and still be ahead of the game.

The only reason I hesitate is because, with the product being discontinued, I know I can't expect to get service or parts for it if it breaks. So is it worth a $32.50 gamble on a product that, if it lasts, could only save me around $100 in its first five years of use—as well as keeping around 400 plastic bottles out of the recycling stream? Or does it make more sense to just assuage my guilt by buying my seltzer in aluminum cans, which are more cost-effective to recycle?

How to recycle whipped cream cans

As you may recall, a few weeks ago I was lamenting about how whipped cream, which is a staple in our house, comes in an aerosol can—one of the few types of containers our town won't accept in mixed recycling. I had considered a variety of ways to either eliminate or recycle the packaging, but I hadn't found one that would work without just creating more waste.

Fortunately, my husband has a much more straightforward approach to problems than I do: he just took the can apart. With a few minutes and a pair of channel lock pliers, he converted a non-recyclable aerosol can (shown on the left) to an innocuous empty steel canister (shown on the right), which can go right in our mixed recycling bin. Well, gee, why didn't I think of that?

For anyone who would like to try this at home, it just takes a few simple steps:

1. Grab the little plastic nozzle with the channel locks, yank it off, and throw it away. (It can't go in recycling because it doesn't have a number code on it, but it's small enough not to worry about.)

2. Grab the edge of the metal ring underneath with the channel locks and pry it up. Work your way around the ring, gradually prying it loose, until the whole thing can be removed. There will be some additional plastic parts underneath (a sort of valve with a couple of little washers), which can also be tossed. This is the only part of the process that's at all tricky, but it only takes a minute or two.

3. Rinse out the can. Lament the fact that there's still at least a tablespoon of good cream sticking to the inside, despite your valiant efforts to drain every last drop of it from the can (directly into your mouth if necessary).

4. Just to make sure the empty can is no longer identifiable as a whipped cream canister, peel off and discard the plastic label, and then crush the steel can underfoot with a nice satisfying stomp.

And voilà—your can is now recyclable.

With this one simple discovery, we've eliminated what I imagine to be a fairly significant percentage, at least by weight, of all the trash we throw away. Now, instead of having to toss a whole big hunk of steel into the trash every month, all we need to throw out is a handful of little plastic bits. That's an amount of waste I'm willing to live with—especially for the sake of not letting any actual cream go to waste.

The whipped cream dilemma

Our town has a pretty good recycling program. We have curbside pickup for all kind of paper, as well as glass, metal, and plastic; with the exception of styrofoam and plastic bags, anything with a numbered recycling code on it can go right in the bin. Moreover, we can take all kinds of electronic waste, including CFL bulbs and rechargeable batteries, down to the Public Works department for recycling, and there's a bin at the local grocery store for collecting plastic bags. So almost all packaging that comes into our house these days can be recycled.

The one unfortunate exception is whipped cream cans. Whipped cream is one of the few foods we tend to buy in its processed form, rather than preparing it from scratch, and for a simple reason: in a pressurized can, cream will stay good indefinitely. We once left a can behind at my parents' house for several months and found it was no good anymore, but we've kept cans in our fridge for a month or longer with no loss of quality. When you buy a little carton of cream and whip it yourself, by contrast, that whipped cream must be consumed immediately if you don't want it to go flat. Even if you whip only part of it at a time, the remaining cream in the container will go sour within a week if it isn't used.

Unfortunately, our efforts to avoid wasting the cream itself mean more waste where the packaging is concerned. You see, the whipped cream can isn't merely a steel can, which would be fine to recycle; it also has a little plastic nozzle on top, which isn't recyclable, and presumably there's also some kind of gas dispenser inside the can that's made of who knows what. I thought it might be possible to dismantle the can somehow to make it recyclable, but when I did a Google search on "recycle whipped cream can," I found that these cans fall under the category of aerosols, which are recyclable in some areas and not in others. It all depends on your local government, and our local recycling guidelines specifically name aerosols as one of the few types of container that can't go in the mixed recycling bin.

Now, in the process of searching for ways to recycle them, I also came across a couple of suggestions for ways to avoid having to buy whipped cream cans in the first place. One site recommends making all whipped cream from scratch (which doesn't work for us for the reasons named above) or buying Cool Whip in a recyclable tub (ugh). I also found a link to a site that sells reusable whipped cream dispensers, which contain a little nitrous oxide charger that inflates the cream just the way the single-use cans do. But while this sounds like an ideal solution in theory, in practice there are several snags:

• First of all, our local grocery store only sells cream in cartons made of plastic-lined cardboard. It's not at all clear from the recycling guidelines that these are recyclable, and if they're not, we're stuck with the same problem we had before.
• Second, while the NO2 dispensers are theoretically recyclable themselves, it's once again unclear whether we could put them out with our curbside recycling.
• Third, the description of the whipped cream dispenser at Amazon.com says that cream stored in it will last "up to two weeks" in the fridge. It's conceivable that we might go through a cup of cream in that amount of time, but it's certainly not guaranteed, and I don't like the idea of having a deadline to use the stuff up before it goes bad. Especially since we wouldn't actually know it had gone bad until we went to spray some onto our pudding, possibly ruining the pudding in the process.
• And fourth, there's the cost to consider. The smallest dispenser from CreamRight costs $23 and holds 1 cup of cream, which makes about 2 pints whipped. It takes one charger to produce this amount; the chargers cost $9 for a case of 24, plus $8 shipping, so if you buy two cases at a time, that works out to 54 cents per quart. A cup of cream costs about $1.29 at the store, bringing the cost up to $1.83 per quart. By contrast, a 14-ounce can of whipped cream from the store typically costs us $3.19 and makes 2.3 quarts, which works out to $1.38 per quart. So even with the cost of packaging, the canned stuff is about 25 percent cheaper.

So it seems the best solution would be to keep buying the canned stuff, but find some way of recycling the empties. So far, however, I'm having no luck finding a way to do that. If our curbside program won't take these cans, where can I take them? I consulted the Earth911 site and it said that the best way to recycle aerosol cans in our area is to take them to household hazardous waste disposal—but the NJ Hazardous Waste site specifically cites empty whipped cream cans as an example of "obviously 'safe' trash" that they shouldn't have to waste their time with. Well, okay, if they're not safe to recycle because they're "aerosols," but they're likewise not unsafe enough to go into hazardous waste disposal, then what do you do with them? Is the trash can the only option? And if so, why?

Maybe I'm just being unrealistic, but it really seems like there should be some way to have my whipped cream (without wasting any) and not have to keep throwing perfectly good steel cans into the trash. Does anyone out there in cyberspace know of an option I'm overlooking?

[UPDATE: We've now figure out how to recycle the cans with a little bit of work. Check out this post for details.]

Frugal heresy

The latest issue of the Dollar Stretcher newsletter featured an article called, "10 Things You Can Stop Buying at the Grocery Store." The author, Carol Channon, claims that you shouldn't need to buy any of these items because, for most of them, it's cheaper and healthier to make them from scratch. Now, this is such a standard piece of advice for newcomers to the frugal life that it has almost taken on the status of a Frugal Commandment—"Thou shalt cook from scratch"—and it seems almost like heresy to contradict it. And I do, in fact, think that this is sound advice in most cases, and I frequently repeat it myself. But looking carefully at this particular article, it seems that Channon has managed in the space of a fairly short list to come up with several items that I consider exceptions to this basic rule. Moreover, she doesn't seem to have even attempted to do the math to calculate whether her money-saving advice really will save you money on these ten items. So at the risk of being branded a frugal heretic, I'd like to look at the ten items on her list, one by one, and discuss the actual numbers before coming to any conclusions about whether we should all strike these items from our grocery lists.

1. Packaged meat. Channon argues that it's much better to buy a whole chicken and cook it yourself, because it makes an easy meal and leaves you a carcass to make stock from. The problem is, a whole chicken costs more per pound than a package of drumsticks. We routinely buy free-range, organic chicken legs from Trader Joe's for $1.99 a pound; a whole organic, free-range chicken, according to this Trader Joe's flyer, cost $2.49 per pound on sale more than a year ago, so the regular price is presumably at least $3 a pound. So while a roast chicken may feel like more of a special-occasion meal than baked chicken drumsticks or thighs, it will also cost more.

As for beef and pork, Channon says you save more money by buying in bulk—by the side, or even a whole animal to be butchered—than buying packages. We don't normally buy these meats, so I'll have to turn for guidance here to Amy Dacyczyn (all hail the Frugal Zealot!), who wrote in her third Tightwad Gazette book that the cost of beef sold by the side "is less than the regular supermarket price for the same cut of meat, but more than the supermarket's loss-leader prices." She also notes that, as with the chicken, "you must buy the more expensive steaks to get the [cheaper] ground beef." So once again, buying packaged meats on sale, and sticking to the cheaper cuts, is likely to give you a better price per pound than buying in bulk as Channon advises.

2. Juice. Channon says it's better for you to eat your fruit whole, and if you really want juice you should squeeze your own. I agree that whole fruit is more healthful than most bottled juice, which is why I drink very little of it. But as far as price goes, her advice once again falls short of the mark. As these figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) show, Valencia oranges cost about $1.03 per pound, while orange juice concentrate costs $2.54 for 16 ounces, which is enough to make a half-gallon of juice. To get that amount of juice from the fruit, you'd have to squeeze 24 oranges, or between 6 and 8 pounds' worth, at a cost of $6.18 to $8.24. So while the home-squeezed juice might be more healthful (because it has the pulp in) and would almost certainly taste better, it would also be a lot more expensive.

3. Microwave popcorn. This is one item on which I agree with Channon. As long-time readers of this blog will recall, I make my own popcorn in a microwave popper at a cost of about 12.5 cents per bowl, and I season it with just a touch of olive oil and salt. Microwave popcorn in bags, by contrast, costs at least 25 cents per bag, even on sale, and is typically loaded with salt and butter (real or synthetic). So I consider the homemade popcorn an all-around win: in addition to being cheaper, it's more healthful, contains far less packaging, and is just as easy to make. (Channon recommends making it the old-fashioned way, in a pot on the stove, which is also fine, but I think my method is easier and just as tasty.)

4. Vegetables. According to Channon, you should either grow all your own vegetables or buy them at the farmers' market to "support your local farmers and local economy." According to my calculations, Brian and I do indeed pay less per pound for the veggies we grow ourselves (some time I'll get around to sharing the calculations with you), but our little garden isn't nearly big enough to supply all the produce we need—and even if we were to convert every square inch of our yard to edible landscaping, and buy a big freezer and canner to store the surplus, there's no way we'd be able to grow enough to get us through the winter without buying any. We couldn't pick up extra from the farmers' market to tide us over, either, because our local farmers' market runs only from June through November (though the associated artisans' market continues through the end of December).

Of course, as Challon would no doubt argue, we could always extra produce from the farmers' market when it's in season and preserve it at home. The problem is, in my observation, produce from the farmers' market almost always costs more than the same items would at the supermarket. Often, our area supermarkets even carry produce that's labeled as local—Jersey Fresh—at prices far lower than we'd pay by "cutting out the middleman" at the farmers' market. I realize this isn't the case everywhere; two-year-old studies in Vermont and Seattle, for instance, found that farmers' markets in those areas offered comparable prices on conventional produce and much better prices on organic. But around here, at least, the economies of scale at the supermarkets mean that they generally offer the best prices, even on produce that's organic or locally grown. This is not to say that I don't consider the produce from the farmers' markets worth the extra money, at least occasionally; I just look on it as a splurge, not a money-saving move.

5. Cookies. Surprisingly, Channon doesn't make the argument that you shouldn't eat cookies at all because they're bad for you, but she does say that it's much better to make them from scratch. I won't dispute that home-baked cookies made by anyone who's halfway competent taste much, much better than store-bought ones, but are they cheaper? I've seen big packages of generic-brand cookies at the supermarket for as little as a dollar; in fact, I've often thought that if I were ever seriously in danger of starving to death, and I just needed to get as many calories into my body as possible for the lowest possible price, it would be hard to do better than to live off one of these packages for a couple of days. Can a homemade cookie really beat that?

To find out, I calculated the cost of a batch of "Basic Refrigerator Cookies" from The Pillsbury Cookbook, which was the most basic, inexpensive-looking recipe I could find. Assuming that a cash-strapped baker would use margarine instead of butter, replace our usual organic sugar and free-range eggs with conventional versions, and leave out the nuts, I calculated the cost of the ingredients for this recipe using the figures from the BLS:

• 3/4 cup sugar (3/8 lb.), 24 cents
• 3/4 cup brown sugar (3/8 lb.), 29 cents
• 1 cup margarine (1/2 lb.), 59 cents
• 1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract (1/4 ounce), 25 cents (based on the price I found at Trader Joe's last year)
• 2 eggs (1/6 doz.), 31 cents
• 3 cups all-purpose flour (1 1/8 lbs.), 60 cents
• baking powder and salt: 2 cents

This comes to $2.30 for the recipe, which supposedly makes 90 cookies (but would probably make no more than 75 without the nuts). So that's about 3 cents per cookie, while the cheap store-bought cookies were roughly 2 cents each. Not nearly as good, I'm sure, but definitely cheaper.

6. Spray cleaners. This is one of the few items for which Channon does give an approximate price: "You could pay $3 or $4 for that spray cleaner," she avers, yet its main ingredient is most likely vinegar, ammonia, or bleach, any of which can be bought more cheaply. This is one where I agree with her; vinegar costs about 45 cents a quart when you buy it in bulk, which works out to only 23 cents a quart when you dilute it 50-50 with water. A 28-ounce bottle of Method cleanser, by contrast, cost me $2.67 on sale at Target last year (the only reason I bought it was to get a new bottle to put my vinegar solution in). So good old vinegar and water, which is tough enough to handle most everyday cleaning jobs (and nontoxic, to boot), is definitely the frugal choice here.

7. Bottled water. Another item for which I agree wholeheartedly with Channon. As I noted way back in 2010, prices for bottled water range from 79 cents to over $150 per gallon, while tap water—which is actually held to higher health and safety standards and, in most tests, tastes as good or better—typically costs about half a cent per gallon. Even if you don't like the taste of your municipal tap water, you'll still pay far less by running it through a filter than you would by buying the bottled stuff, and you'll produce far less waste as well.

8. Herbs. I agree with Channon that these are way too expensive at the store. We've seen tiny packages selling for $2 or $3, and even if you buy a big bunch for a buck, as we do with parsley, you're left with the problem of how to use it all up before it goes bad. In most cases, when you use herbs, you only need a little bit, so it makes sense to follow Channon's advice and grow your own (either in a garden bed or in pots) and snip off pieces as needed. We have an herb bed outside our kitchen door in which we grow rosemary, sage, oregano, thyme, and mint; they fade in the winter but pop up again green and healthy in the spring. We also grow lots of basil in the garden, and after the frost hits we usually manage to nurse one plant through the winter in a pot. However, we've had no success keeping either parsley or cilantro alive in pots, so if we need these in the winter, we usually either go ahead and buy a big bunch or make do with dried.

9. Bread. This is a tricky one. Brian and I (well, Brian mostly) do bake all our own bread, even after the demise of our bread machine earlier this year, but we do this largely because (a) fresh bread tastes better and (b) Brian likes to bake. And we do spend less on our homemade bread than we would on store-bought bread; according to my calculations, each loaf costs us between 80 cents and a dollar, while the BLS figures show the typical cost of a one-pound loaf ranging from $1.41 to $2.04. However, the bargain rack at our supermarket fairly often has loaves of slightly stale bread marked down to as little as a dollar, so if we made a habit of stocking up on these and freezing them, it would be nearly as cheap as baking our own. Of course, it would require a larger freezer, so for now baking it ourselves is still a better value.

10. Trash bags. Channon's argument here is that if you simply cut back on packaged foods, recycle most food containers, and compost food scraps, you will "have less trash" to throw away. All of this is true, but she overlooks the rather glaring fact that less trash is not the same thing as no trash. As I observed when analyzing the contents of our trash last year, there are still some items that can't be either avoided, recycled, or composted, such as dental floss (I've never found one that's biodegradable), bottle caps, cereal box liners, deodorant tubes, and the occasional styrofoam tray. Also, what about the bones from that whole chicken she just advised us to buy back at the top of the list? You can't compost those, even after you've made stock of them, so they'll have to go in the trash—and once they're in there, they'll begin to make your house unpleasant if you don't get them out to the curb in fairly short order.

Admittedly, cutting down on the amount of waste you produce will mean you go through far fewer trash bags. Brian and I have, I believe, bought only two large boxes of them since we moved into this house over six years ago. But still, we will need to buy some eventually—unless Channon has some alternative to offer that she didn't see fit to mention in her article.

So out of the ten items on Channon's list, there are five that I mostly agree with and five that I mostly disagree with. I'm not saying it's a bad idea to buy whole chickens or local produce, to eat whole fruit instead of juice, to bake your own cookies, or to cut down on waste; I'm just saying that these strategies won't necessarily save you money.

Product free when you buy the package

As an ecofrugal individual, I like to reduce waste whenever I can. And since nearly a third of all trash in this country comes from product packaging, one of the main ways I try to reduce waste is to choose products with less packaging. Case in point: cleaning products. Rather than buy a separate product for every room in my house, complete with its own bottle that has to be stored and eventually disposed of, I rely on just a few staples to clean nearly everything: dish soap, baking soda, and vinegar. A vinegar-and-water solution, stored in a spray bottle, is especially handy: a squirt of this and a swipe with a rag is a quick fix for anything from grease-splattered walls in the kitchen to smudgy windows. (It can even keep your car windows from icing up if you spray it on ahead of time—and if ice has already formed, spraying it with this will help melt it faster.)

The problem is that I use this stuff so often that I find I'm always running out and having to mix up more. The squirt bottle I use is a cheapie that cost me a couple of bucks at the drugstore, and while it works fine, it only holds a little over a cup. So when I had to interrupt my cleaning of the bathroom yesterday to refill the bottle, I finally got fed up and decided it was worth spending a couple of extra bucks on a bigger bottle. And since we needed to go out anyway to get some compost, I figured it would be no trouble to add a quick stop at Target to our agenda.

Once we managed to find the cleaning supplies at the Target, I found that they only had one decent-sized squirt bottle on the shelf, and the cost was $4.79—a bit more than I'd expected. But I reminded myself that my expectations about prices are often unreasonable, since I live in a little tightwad bubble in which things are hardly ever bought new, and that it was unlikely I'd find a bottle like this for less than five bucks anywhere else. And that would have been that, except that on the way to the checkout, we passed by a rack full of Method brand cleaning supplies. This is a 21st-century brand that's marketed to eco-conscious types: nontoxic, vegetable-based cleansers, no animal testing, and 100 percent recycled packaging that actually looks decent out on the counter. Yet unlike many "green" products, it isn't really more expensive than mainstream cleaners of the same type. In fact, the shelf at the Target proclaimed that most of the Method products, ranging from glass cleaner to dish soap in all manner of colors and fragrances, were on sale at 3 for $8. And most of them were in—guess what?—squirt bottles.

So I did a quick mental calculation: "Hmm, I could buy an empty bottle for $4.79, or I could buy a bottle of cleanser for $2.67, and after I used it all up, I'd have a perfectly good reusable squirt bottle." Even if it turned out I didn't like the Method cleaner at all, I could just dump it down the sink (hey, nontoxic, right?) and have the bottle for less than I would have spent to buy an empty one. How could I go wrong?

After perusing the selection for a while, I settled on the "all-purpose" cleanser in Pink Grapefruit scent, which I figured would be closest to my trusty vinegar-and-water solution (well, maybe not for de-icing car windows). I gave it a try today, and it seems to be able to handle quick clean-ups as well as the vinegar solution, if not necessarily better—and I will admit, it does smell better. So I think we'll be perfectly content to use this stuff in place of the vinegar for the next several months, and when it's gone, the bottle can get refilled with the old standby (possibly with a bit of citrus oil added to improve the scent).

What I found most interesting about this little exercise is that, when I came to think about it, it wasn't the first time I'd bought a product mainly to get the package. I can think of two more examples just off the top of my head:

• Last week, after waiting a couple of months in vain for Blue Bunny frozen yogurt to go on sale, we finally gave in and bought a container at full price so that I could reuse the lid for my bathroom compost bin.
• After several months of reading the increasingly shrill warnings about the dangers of reusing plastic water and soda bottles (most of which, by the way, turn out to be based on insufficient evidence), and the repeated admonishments to go out and buy a safe, reusable bottle such as a $20 Kleen Kanteen, I decided instead to go to the store and buy a $1.29 glass bottle of Snapple. After drinking the contents, I washed out the bottle, filled it with plain tap water, and stashed it in the car, where it's continued to live (aside from the occasional re-washing) ever since.

The thing about these purchases is that, since what I'm really buying is the packaging, it's almost like getting the product itself for free. Buy a $2.66 plastic spray bottle, and get a quart of all-purpose cleaner free; buy a $1.29 glass water bottle, and get a pint of Snapple free; buy a $4.49 compost container, and get seven cups of frozen yogurt free. (Okay, maybe that last one wasn't really such a bargain, but I wasn't having any luck finding a better deal.) Of course, for someone who normally tries to reduce the amount of packaging I buy, it is a bit ironic to be buying products just for their packaging—but if the alternative is buying the package without the product, and paying more for it, that doesn't really make any more sense, does it?

Has anyone else ever done this—buying a product primarily to get the container? Can you add any more examples to my list?

Waste is a terrible thing to mind, part 2

Ever since posting two weeks back about how our household trash compares to that of other homes in our neighborhood, in the U.S., and around the world, I've been paying much closer attention to everything that goes into our wastebaskets. I notice not just what I throw out, but what comes into the house that might need to be thrown out. Last week, for example, when we went to the grocery store to stock up on some sale items, I found myself sizing up all the packages that went into our cart with a critical eye: "The Blue Bunny ice cream comes in a recyclable plastic carton, so that's good. But the brand of pasta that's on sale comes in a bag, not a box, so you can't recycle or reuse it; it's just trash. And what about these orange juice cartons? We can reuse them for seedling trays, but how many more of those do we really need? Could we compost them, or are they plastic-coated?" (The best answer I could find was this article at Earth911.com, which says that the cartons are about 80 percent paper and 20 percent plastic. You can recycle them in some areas, but not where we live.)

This led me to the conclusion that there actually are still things we could do to reduce our household waste; it's just that we'd have to spend more money to do so. We've already done all the things that are obvious win-wins from an ecofrugal standpoint: eschewing bottled water, carrying reusable shopping bags, using cloth hankies instead of paper tissues (although those can actually be composted), and so on. Now we've reached the point where we have to choose between eco and frugal, where cutting our waste further means skipping the sale items in favor of slightly pricier ones that come in more eco-friendly packaging. So the real question at this point is, how much more should we be willing to pay to reduce waste? Is it worth paying 20 cents more for a pound of pasta to eliminate an ounce of plastic packaging waste? That would work out to $3.20 per pound of waste eliminated; is that a good deal? How can you decide?

Here's a peek at some of the items currently in our trash cans, and my estimate of what it would cost to remove each item from future trash loads:

• Several plastic windows torn out of junk-mail envelopes. I've already signed up for the Direct Mail Association's mail preference service, but that doesn't affect solicitations from charitable and political groups. The only way I can think of to eliminate these would be to call the charities individually and ask to be removed from their mailing lists. Cost: probably nothing in dollars (since most organizations have toll-free numbers), but potentially hours of phone time, and no guarantee that it would actually work. Weight saved: far less than one ounce per week.
• The plastic envelope in which our new futon cover was delivered. This is a tough one. Keeping the old futon cover wasn't really an option (after eight years, it was neither presentable nor structurally sound), and short of sewing it myself (which is definitely beyond my limited skills), I'm not sure how we could have bought a new one that didn't come with packaging. I guess it's possible that if we'd gone down to the local futon shop, we could have bought one and told them, "no bag, thanks, we'll take it as it is." But their covers start at $166 for a double mattress, and the one we just bought cost $40 at Overstock.com. So that makes a cost difference of $126 to save a little over an ounce.
• A few plastic liners from cereal boxes. I've never found any brand of breakfast cereal that didn't come in either a bag or a lined box, so I guess to eliminate these, we'd have to stop eating breakfast cereal altogether and start baking more homemade granola. Cost: factoring in the ingredients and fuel, about 25 cents per week—plus the time it takes to bake, and the annoyance factor of heating up the house in the summertime. And Brian would probably get tired of granola pretty quickly.
• A seltzer bottle cap. The bottles themselves are recyclable, but the caps don't have a number on them. Eliminating these would be as simple as switching to cans, which can be recycled in their entirety (and also crushed to save space in the bin, which might be a plus). Seltzer costs about 62 cents per quart in bottles, 66 cents per quart in cans, so that's only an extra few cents a week—but the amount of waste saved is pretty trivial.
• An empty deodorant container. There are "alternative" deodorants that don't come in these plastic containers—natural salts and such like—but as far as I can tell, they don't work at all, so that would just be a big waste of money. So I guess the best alternative would be Tom's of Maine, which comes in a recyclable plastic tube. This costs about $5 for a 2.2-ounce stick, as opposed to $1 for a 3-ounce Speed Stick or Arm & Hammer bought on sale—so over the course of two months, we'd be spending about $6.80 extra to eliminate a single tube that weighs about 1.5 ounces. (And of course, we don't really know how effective the Tom's deodorant would be. The social costs wearing a deodorant that doesn't work are hard to calculate.)
• One of the most puzzling items, several strands of dental floss. Most dental floss is made from nylon, so it can't go in the compost. It seems like there ought to be some out there that's biodegradable, but when I searched for "biodegradable floss," all I could find was floss that comes in biodegradable containers, such as Smart Floss and Eco-Dent. Eventually I managed to find a brand called Radius, which is made of silk (!) and costs $4.50 for 50 yards, as opposed to the $1.50 we pay for 100 yards. So that's a difference of $7.50 for something that weighs less than an ounce for the entire package (including the plastic case, which is recyclable) and takes us more than three months to go through. Out of curiosity, I also checked to see whether there is a reusable alternative to floss. I found one called the Bryton Pick, which is made of flexible stainless steel with a plastic handle—but since it can only be reused for "up to 30 days," I suspect this would produce a lot more waste, as measured by weight, than the floss. I also found a blog entry describing a product called Stim-U-Dent Thin Plaque Removers, which appear to be glorified toothpicks. The thin ones (which I suspect I would need, since my teeth are pretty tightly spaced) cost $3.79 for 160, an 80-day supply for the two of us, as opposed to $1.20 for an equivalent amount of floss. That's a cost difference of $2.59, or about a dollar a month. It's better than the silk floss, but still, is it worth it to save such a trivial amount of weight?
• Most evil of all, a Styrofoam tray—the kind that meat comes on, only this one held veggies from the bargain rack at the grocery store. Even in our town, where just about any plastic item with a recycling symbol can go in the bins, you can't recycle Styrofoam. The veggies it held were marked down to $1.23, so if that was half price, it would cost $1.23 extra to eliminate this very lightweight but relatively bulky item.

Looking over this partial list, I realize that the problem is that each individual item is so small that eliminating any one of them could provide only a tiny reduction in weight. It could add up over time with items that get used regularly, like the deodorant, but even that doesn't get used up very fast. So in most cases, it seems hard to justify spending extra money to eliminate such as small amount of weight.

The only change that seems like it might be worthwhile is buying seltzer in cans—because although I'm saving only the weight of the cap, not the whole bottle, the cans aren't much more expensive and are actually somewhat more practical. They're smaller, so they don't go flat as fast, and I can keep just a couple of them cold in the fridge and the rest in their case on top of it, which helps reduce fridge overcrowding. But the thing is, if I switched to cans, I'd be doing it mainly for those benefits—not for the immeasurably small amount of waste it would eliminate. So none of this actually gets me any closer to figuring out what's a reasonable cost per pound for waste reduction. Anyone got an idea for a reasonable rubric?

Getting rid of "stupid plastic"

Recently, the blog at GreenAmerica.org ran an entry about the evils of plastic. Most of it was stuff we've all heard before—it's ubiquitous, it's toxic, it kills baby sea turtles—but the author did concede that "There are a lot of great things that plastic has made possible, like artificial hearts, lightweight glasses, and Kevlar vests for police officers." So she summed up her position on plastic in the words of an activist interviewed in the documentary Bag It—"We’re not saying no to all plastic. We’re saying no to stupid plastic"—and announced that each Monday the blog would feature a new post on "how we’ve gotten stupid plastic out of our lives, and where we’re facing challenges." (In yesterday's post, for instance, she talks about the difficulty of eliminating plastic food packaging for someone who hates to cook.)

I like the idea of targeting "stupid plastic," rather than trying to eliminate all plastic (a goal that's almost certainly futile and quite possibly counterproductive). But it did kind of raise the question of just which plastics can be considered "stupid," and how you draw the line. Some products are easy to identify as "stupid," such as single-use grocery bags (which can be eliminated entirely with a single, reusable canvas bag). But other cases are trickier. Some products are clearly necessary (clothing, for instance) but don't necessarily have to be made out of plastic. But does that mean that products made of alternative materials are automatically better? Some readers of the blog seemed to think so, bragging about their wooden toothbrushes and metal toothpaste tubes. But I had to wonder: what about the environmental impact of cutting down trees to make those toothbrushes, and raising the pigs used for the bristles, and mining and smelting the metal to make the toothpaste tubes? Don't we have to take that into consideration? And if so, just how do we figure out which type of material is least harmful to the environment?

There's also durability to consider. Is a wooden toothbrush that gets tossed in the compost bin and replaced every three months a better choice than a plastic toothbrush with replaceable heads that gets used year after year, with only the heads being replaced? What about a nylon shopping bag that wears better than a cotton canvas bag? And let's not forget the impact of shipping. Glass bottles may be less toxic than plastic ones (though not necessarily safer, since they can break) and easier to recycle, but they're also a lot heavier. So if all soft drinks were still packaged in glass bottles, how much more fuel would be required to ship them around the country? How would the amount of petroleum used in transporting the heavier bottles compare to the amount used in producing the lighter ones? Is it even possible to calculate?

I don't pretend to have the answers to these questions, and I'm not sure anyone does. So speaking for myself, I'm going to continue to focus my anti-plastic efforts on the "stupid plastics" that I know are stupid: namely, the ones that can be eliminated completely with no negative impact (and in many cases, a positive impact) on my quality of life. So here are a few examples of plastic items that I have no doubts about giving up—and others that I'm going to be holding onto for a while:

• As mentioned above, single-use plastic grocery bags are a definite "don't need" for me. However, I have no plans to give up my polyester ChicoBag, which I think more than makes up for its own modest plastic content by being so portable that it's easily tucked in my purse, ensuring that I'll never be caught out without a shopping bag and need to bring home a disposable one.
• I'm also not planning to give up plastic garbage bags (what would I replace them with?). However, I do cut down on the use of them by producing less trash, so I only need to take it out every couple of weeks.
• I have never bought bottled water, which, as I mentioned in this post over a year ago, is neither healthier nor, according to most taste tests, better tasting than tap water, which is virtually free. (However, rather than invest in a $20 eco-friendly aluminum flask for carrying tap water on the go, as some green organizations recommend, I simply bought a $1.50 glass bottle of Snapple, drank the contents, and rinsed it out.)
• I'm certainly not giving up my computer, printer, and other peripherals, with all the plastic parts they contain. However, in the seven years I've owned my (now ridiculously outdated) HP inkjet printer, I've bought only one plastic replacement cartridge for it, thanks to an ink refill kit that has paid for itself many times over. And, by keeping all my equipment so long past what most would consider its expiration date, I'm reducing the demand for new plastic stuff.
• I plan to continue buying orange juice in plastic bottles (the good stuff) whenever it's on sale. The #1 plastic bottles are recyclable, while the cardboard cartons have to go in the trash. (Frozen OJ concentrate does have less packaging, but even it has some that's nonrecyclable—and it's actually more expensive than the good stuff purchased on sale.)
• I get most of my music in digital download form these days, so I don't need to fill up my house with more polycarbonate CDs. We do buy the occasional DVD, but more often we borrow them from the library, or find free stuff to watch on Hulu and other sites.

That's all that comes to mind at the moment. Would anyone else care to weigh in with examples of plastics that are definitely "stupid"—or not so stupid?

Shame on Starbucks

The other day, I decided to walk across the river to the nearest Starbucks and treat myself to a Frappucino, simply in honor of its being such a beautiful May day.  Now, every other time I've gone for a Starbucks run in recent years, I've remembered only just as I was walking in the door that I should have brought bring a reusable cup with me, on the general ecofrugal principle that it's always better to reuse anything (a cup, a grocery bag, a handkerchief) than to use a disposable equivalent and throw it away.  But this time, for a change, I actually remembered it before I left the house.  So I tucked my cup in my big handbag and set out, curious to see how the baristas would react to it.

Well, the result was a big disappointment.  The cashier wasn't too fazed at being presented with a reusable cup; I got the impression that my request was a bit unusual, but she did know how to deal with it.  She stuck a little sticky note on my cup, wrote my drink order on it, and queued it up behind all the other marked-up plastic cups.  From where I stood, I could watch its progress through the line, and I watched as the barista started mixing up my drink.  Rather than putting it directly into my cup, he measured out the mix in a disposable Starbucks cup, dumped it in the blender, whipped it up, and poured it from there into my cup—tossing the one he'd used to do the measuring into the trash.  So it turns out that bringing my own cup was not only a waste of effort; it was actually counterproductive from an environmental standpoint.  It resulted in exactly the same amount of waste, plus the water required to wash my reusable cup—and the plastic cup the barista used ended up in the trash, rather than coming home with me and going into the recycling bin.

So, two lessons learned: 1) I shouldn't bother bringing a reusable cup to Starbucks, and 2) if I really want to reduce waste, I should get my coffee fix at Dunkin' Donuts instead, where they not only know how to reuse cups but also use Fair Trade certified beans in all their espresso drinks.

Another semi-ecofrugal idea

The same TipHero article that led me to yesterday's discovery of carbon credits for individuals today steered me toward another site that appears, on the surface, to be a model of ecofrugality. The company is called Terracycle, and what it does is collect trash that can't be recycled—juice packs, candy wrappers, Ziploc bags—and "upcycle" it into new products. Most recycled materials end up being "downcycled," or turned into a new product with lower value than the original (for example, office paper and cardboard being shredded for use as packaging material). Terracycle's products, by contrast, are allegedly worth more than the waste materials they're made from. Among the products for sale on their site are a cork board made from used wine corks, a backpack made from Capri-Sun pouches, and an insulated cooler made from Starburst wrappers. The waste materials they use are collected by individuals across the country, who get rewarded for their efforts with a semiannual check to a school or charity of their choice.

I don't deny that this is a very clever idea, and at first blush, it seems very ecofrugal as well. After all, they're taking waste and turning it into useful products, right? Isn't preventing waste the very definition of ecofrugality? Yet the more I browse the site and learn about its products, the more I'm convinced it's not for me.

The first problem I have with it is that so many of the waste materials they collect are for specific name-brand products, such as M&M/Mars-branded candy wrappers, Aveeno beauty product packages, and Neosporin tubes. This means that an ecofrugal person like myself, who prefers store brands, will have a hard time collecting enough of anything to fill a container. And many of these branded packages get upcycled into new products that still bear the brand's name, like Oreo three-ring binders and Clif Bar pencil cases. So Terracycle products are actually a form of advertising for the companies whose materials they use. They serve to promote brand loyalty, which in turn undermines the ecofrugal habits of choosing store brands and cooking from scratch.

Second, even the materials they collect that aren't branded tend to be in some way wasteful. They don't ask for a specific brand of juice pouches, for instance, but all juice pouches, regardless of brand, are absurdly overpackaged. It's much cheaper to buy juice in a big bottle, or better yet in a tube of frozen concentrate to be mixed with water, and both options produce far less packaging waste. I can't help thinking it must be better, in terms of full-cycle environmental costs, to avoid excess packaging in the first place than to assuage your guilt by sending off the wasteful packages to be made into new products. Even if the juice pouches stay out of the waste stream, they still require more materials and energy to produce, ship to stores, ship back to Terracycle, and upcycle into new products than other, cheaper alternatives.

Admittedly, there are some products here that an ecofrugal person might use, such as zip-top plastic bags. There are always some occasions when reusable containers aren't practical. But most ecofrugalites would prefer to save money and resources by rinsing and reusing the bags, and continuing to reuse them until they develop holes. Perhaps they could still be Terracycled at that point, but it does seem like encouraging people to send their bags to Terracycle for "upcycling" after just one use is tacitly discouraging reuse at home (which is much easier to do and wastes no energy on shipping).

My final quibble, and perhaps the most serious, is that many of the products sold by Terracycle don't actually seem to be that useful. Turning a bunch of candy wrappers into a pencil case isn't really preventing waste if the person who buys that pencil case didn't need it in the first place. On the contrary, it's just adding a new level of wastefulness, because now in addition to the materials and energy used to produce and ship the original candy wrappers, you have the energy (and probably some additional materials) required to produce and ship the pencil case to a new owner who was doing just fine without it—not to mention the waste of money on a product that isn't really necessary. Admittedly, some of these products are necessary, like a backpack or notebooks for school—but wouldn't it be more ecofrugal to buy a sturdy canvas backpack and keep it for several years, repairing it as needed, than to buy a new cheap backpack every year, even if it does have recycled cookie wrappers in it?

Perhaps I'm not being really fair to TerraCycle. After all, the majority of consumers probably are going to buy candy bars and juice pouches anyway, and replace their school supplies yearly—and given that, it's probably less wasteful for those candy wrappers and juice pouches to get turned into new school supplies than simply used once and discarded. (I say "probably" because, without an accurate tally of the complete life-cycle energy costs, there's no way to know for sure whether these upcycled products actually require less material and energy to make and ship than would be used in simply landfilling the wastes—or incinerating them to recover some of their value as energy.) But I still feel convinced that those of us who are truly ecofrugal—who already take steps to save money, avoid packaging waste, and buy durable products that will last—will have very little to gain by either sending waste to Terracycle or buying products from them.

Stuff Most People Pay Too Much For

First of all, apologies for the two-week delay since my last entry. My new job writing reports for ConsumerSearch has been keeping me so busy that I haven't had time to blog except on weekends—and between Yom Kippur services with my mom on Saturday and a fall-equinox celebration with friends on Sunday, last weekend was crammed full.

By the by, let me take a moment here to insert a plug for ConsumerSearch, an incredibly handy site that I would recommend even if I weren't working for them. Here's an example of how it works. Suppose you're shopping for, say, a TV set. Normally, you might start by consulting Consumer Reports to see which models they recommend. Then you might check a few other publications that have reviews of electronic items, such as Wired, to see if they agree with those recommendations. If you really wanted to be thorough, maybe you'd go to a site like Amazon.com or Epinions.com to see what users have to say about the model you're interested in: do they like it, or have they discovered problems with it that didn't show up in the professionals' tests? And finally, once you'd settled on a TV, you'd visit several sites to compare prices before deciding where to buy it.

Well, ConsumerSearch does all that work for you. We consult the best publications and the user review sites, and then we report on what we find there and make recommendations in several categories; for a TV, these might be different types—LCD, plasma, etc.—or different sizes, or different price ranges. You can click on a link to read more about the particular product that interests you and see price comparisons from around the Web. Having worked on these reports, I can attest that they're very thorough; it takes me about 30 hours of work to research and write one, but it only takes about fifteen minutes to read it and have everything set out neatly for you. And if you have even less time than that to spare, you can read just the front page, where we identify the top products, with a paragraph about each one laying out its pros and cons.

I think this is a really great tool for the ecofrugal, because it helps you spend your money wisely (and protect the environment at the same time by choosing products that will last, rather than needing replacement after a year or so). ConsumerSearch reports don't generally focus specifically on the "green" features of a product, but we do, where appropriate, include "green" products as one of our Best-Reviewed categories (for example, with laundry detergents).

So there's my pitch. We now return you to our regularly scheduled blog entry, the topic of which is: Stuff Most People Pay Too Much For. This idea was inspired the article "6 Outrageously Overpriced Products," which has become the subject of a lively discussion in the Dollar Stretcher forums. The six items in the article are movie theater popcorn, greeting cards, textbooks, bottled water, printer ink, and designer clothing. This struck me as a good list of items to discuss in ecofrugal terms, because one thing that struck me about them was just how many of these overpriced items are also wasteful from an ecological point of view.

Bottled water, for instance, has been the subject of a whole campaign by the Center for a New American Dream, an organization with an ecofrugal focus, which points out how much energy and material is wasted in making, filling, shipping, and disposing of all those plastic bottles and urges people to replace them with reusable bottles they can fill from the tap. When I first applied to work for ConsumerSearch, they asked me to audition, as it were, by writing a sample report on bottled water using sources they provided. This process reinforced what I'd already learned about just how wasteful bottled water really is. The sources revealed that (1) municipal drinking water is actually held to higher safety standards than bottled water, (2) tap water costs about half a cent per gallon, while bottled water can cost anywhere from 79 cents a gallon for a supermarket brand to a whopping $159 a gallon for the fancy French stuff, and (3) in blind taste tests, tap water generally fares as well as or better than bottled water.

Likewise, new printer cartridges are not only expensive but also wasteful. Throwing out a whole cartridge and buying a new one just because it's out of ink is even more of a waste than discarding a bottle because you've finished the water. Refilling the ink cartridges is a much better use of resources—including cash. We bought a big bottle of black ink and a color refill kit for our inkjet printer several years back, and it cost us about as much as a single new cartridge; since then, we have refilled the cartridges many times and had no problems. We did eventually have to replace one of them because the print head got too worn down to work, but that's a much better deal than replacing it every single time it runs out of ink. (Back when we bought the printer, the sales guy tried to dissuade us from refilling the colored ink cartridges, claiming that this would "destroy the print heads." Um, okay, so if it does, we'll have to do what? Buy a new cartridge, right? Which is exactly what we'll have to do if we don't refill it, right? So what do we have to lose by trying it?)

Greeting cards and textbooks? They're not exactly wasteful, but there may be better alternatives. A hand-written note is more thoughtful, and probably more welcome, than what Miss Manners calls the "canned sentiments" of a store-bought greeting card, and if you want it to go on a pretty card, you can get nice blank ones that are suitable for all occasions for a very reasonable cost. (I actually get mine for nothing; I have two partially-used boxes of them that I've received as gifts from family members, and a bunch more that I've been sent as "gifts" from organizations looking for donations.) And I've heard of colleges making their course textbooks available in electronic format, for download to either an e-reader or a personal computer. (One of my own publishing clients reportedly says, "The book is dead" and prophesies that in future all their material will be published in electronic formats. This may be a bit of an overstatement—as I observed back in June, there are still plenty of good reasons to prefer a book rather than an e-reader for curling up with—but for textbooks, I think the advantages of easy-to-update electronic media may well outweigh those of print.)

Designer clothing isn't as green as thrift-shop clothes, but it's not necessarily less green than new clothing from a low-end retailer. But boy, the cost differences sure are shocking. This was brought home to me recently when I got a free trial issue of Real Simple magazine in the mail, and the page on "Trends Worth Trying" featured a big handbag that the editors promised was "destined to be a classic." It's a nice enough bag, if you like that sort of thing—multicolored cotton canvas with leather trim (you can see a picture here)—and it measures a capacious 15 by 23 inches, but the price tag was a jaw-dropping $998. Nearly a thousand dollars. For a handbag. The ironic part was that right before that page, there was a two-page advertising spread devoted to the Merona line of clothes, sold at Target. The model is wearing a classic-yet-modern plaid trench coat with jeans and riding boots, and she's carrying a large black tote priced at $25. I actually like this bag better than the Ralph Lauren one, not just because it's basic black and will go with everything, but also because it's made of faux-leather, with no real leather parts. No animals were harmed in the making of this bag. It's not as big as the Ralph Lauren "weekender," but for one-fortieth the price, I think I'd happily make that compromise.

Movie theater popcorn, by the same token, isn't necessarily more wasteful than home-popped corn; it's just way, way more expensive. But it's an expense we haven't had to deal with in years, because we've pretty much stopped going to movies. It's not just that we balk at paying $10 for a ticket to a movie we know we'll most likely be able to check out of a Redbox in another few months for $1 (or out of the library for nothing); we actually prefer watching them at home. We can sit on our own comfy couch instead of the theater's seats, which may or many not work properly; we don't have pick our way through other people's spilled popcorn and sticky gum; we don't have to sit through a half-hour of annoying advertisements and trailers for movies we would never want to see before getting to the one we came to see; we don't have to listen to children screaming or adults yakking on their cell phones before (and sometimes during) the movie; we can hit the pause button when we have to pee, instead of either pushing past a row of people twice (coming and going) and missing part of the film, or else sitting through half the movie with a full bladder; and we can make our own popcorn for pennies a bowl. (Of course, I won't deny that all the discomforts I just mentioned are only exacerbated by the fact that you have to pay through the nose for the privilege of being subjected to them. But even if the cost were the same, I think we'd still prefer a home movie night to a trip to the theater.)

When I started writing this entry, I was planning to discuss another article as well, sent to me by my mom: "Ten things that aren't free - but should be (and how to get them for free anyway)." But looking at the ten items covered in this article (checking accounts, corkage fees, directory assistance, driving cross country, TV, movie rentals, college tuition, books, toothbrushes, and online games), I find that they don't strike me as wasteful in the same way as the items on the first list. They are, for the most part, items worth having; they're just not necessarily worth paying for. Also, this article seems to be pretty long already. So perhaps I'll save a discussion of those items for another day. Watch this space for "Stuff Most People Pay Too Much For, Part 2."