Recyclable =/= sustainable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gift of less stuff

We're in the middle of a busy couple of months. Between events with Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL), Morris dance performances, and stuff we're doing with family and friends, we don't have a single free weekend until June. And some weekends, including this one, are crammed full of events on both days. Today, I was "tabling" (staffing a table at a street fair) for CCL in the afternoon, and we're going to the opening of our local outdoor movie series tonight; tomorrow, we have a Morris performance down in South Jersey during the day and a CCL get-together in exactly the opposite direction in the evening. With all that going on, this hour before dinner is about the only time I've got to update my blog, so you're only getting a quickie post this week.

One of the things that kept us busy last weekend was Mother's Day. My mom is a difficult person to buy gifts for, because her house is so full already that she doesn't need any more stuff. On the contrary, she's always saying she wants to get rid of the stuff she has. So, last year, I had a brainwave: I offered, as my Mother's Day gift to her, to come to her house and spend the day helping her clean out one room of her choice. I didn't suggest this because she had any heavy boxes to move, nor because I thought I could do a better job than she could deciding what to throw away, what to keep, and where to put it. The main advantage of having me there all day was that it would force her to sit down and do the work of going through things, instead of wanting to do it and never finding the time. And it seemed to work pretty well. She chose her office, and by the end of the day we'd cleared away all the piles of paper in there, removed some old things of mine that had been sitting in that room since it was my bedroom, and put all her computer equipment in places where she could easily find it.

Since that was such a success, I decided to give her the same "gift" this year. This time around, she decided to get a bit more ambitious and tackle the sun porch, which is a repository of all kinds of miscellany: decades-old toys, plants and garden supplies, old sporting equipment, a big bookshelf full of board games and puzzles, and a huge stack of my old notebooks from high school and college. Mom seemed to think we could go through this stuff quickly and maybe have time to move on to another room, but I suspected we wouldn't even make a dent in the contents of the the porch itself. 

It turns out the answer was somewhere in the middle. We didn't clean out the whole porch, but we did get through a lot more of it than I expected. I spent a large portion of the day going through my old notebooks, pulling out the few things I wanted to keep (mostly stories and poems that I didn't have digital copies of), then breaking down the notebooks themselves so the contents could be recycled. I discarded so much paper that I had to split it between two separate bins so they wouldn't be too heavy for my dad to haul to the curb. But I also found time to review the contents of several bins and shelves with my mom. She opted to keep a lot more of the games and puzzles than I would have in her place, but we still set aside quite a lot of them to give away. We also cleared out things from the bins I'd had no idea were in there: a couple of giant "magic bubble wands," several old tennis rackets, a baseball bat and a few balls, multiple Frisbees, an old model airplane kit, and even an old jump rope of mine that I hadn't seen in decades.

All that stuff went downstairs into the storage room, where it will sit until Hopewell holds its next town-wide yard sale. My parents aren't planning to host an official sale, but they'll haul out a folding table, set it up on the lawn, and put out all their unwanted items with a big sign saying that everything (barring the table itself) is free. They hope that the yard-sale shoppers, always eager for a bargain, will snap up most of it, leaving them with only a few items to either Freecycle or discard.

All in all, I'd say this was a pretty ecofrugal present. It was something my mom actually wanted, and it cost nothing and used no natural resources to produce. Better still, it helped get all this unwanted stuff out of the house and, hopefully, into the homes of people who can use it—people who might otherwise have spent their own money, and the planet's resources, on new products. In fact, it worked so well I'm thinking of offering the same gift to my dad for Father's Day next month. (That will result in one more rather full weekend in June, but at least it will be only one weekend out of an otherwise quiet month.)

108 handkerchiefs

My in-laws are moving. Their new, one-level house will be a lot easier for them to get around in, and it's conveniently close to Brian's brother, so he can visit them regularly and give them a hand with household tasks. However, it also has a lot less space, which means a lot of the stuff in their current house needs to go somewhere else. One item his mom unearthed recently was a whole bag full of dainty handkerchiefs that had belonged to his grandmother and great-grandmother. They were all quite old and mostly quite fancy—embroidered, patterned, lace-trimmed, all sorts—but they hadn't been used in decades and she had no idea what to do with them. So, hating to see them go to waste, I offered to take them off her hands.

This weekend, the hankies arrived, care of Brian's sister and her family, who were stopping by for a visit as part of a trip to New York. (Obligatory brag: they're going to see their daughter perform with her college orchestra at Carnegie Hall.) There were a lot more of them than I'd expected, and they'd all acquired a musty smell from their long years in storage. It was clear they'd all need to be washed before I could put them to use. 

Since our washer is a front-loader, which is gentler on clothes than the old agitator models, I wasn't worried about running these old and delicate pieces through it. (We needed to do a load of sheets anyway, so it didn't even use any extra water.) However, I hesitated to entrust them to the tumble dryer, and today's weather was too wet for outdoor drying. We filled every inch of both our indoor drying racks, along with the towel rack in the downstairs bathroom, and still that wasn't enough room for all of them. Brian had to string a couple of clotheslines from the laundry room ceiling to accommodate the rest. 

As we hung them, we counted them out. We initially thought there were 105, but that total got amended to 108 after we discovered that three of them had hitched rides on our bedsheets and gone through the dryer after all. (Fortunately, they appeared to have suffered no damage.) Which led to a new question: where were we going to put them all? Our current collection of roughly a dozen plain cotton handkerchiefs lives in Brian's underwear drawer, but there was never going to be room in there for this lot.

Then a thought occurred to me. Brian and I almost exclusively use handkerchiefs ourselves, but we do have one box of disposable tissues in the house for guests. Since it's seldom used, we store it on top of the fridge under a whimsical trompe-l'oeil cover. What if we replaced the tissues in that box with a stack of these fancy hankies instead? Then, whenever guests asked for a tissue, we could offer them a nice, reusable alternative. We'd just need a separate container, like a basket, to collect the used ones for later laundering. Being able to discard the hanky immediately after use, just like a disposable tissue, might be enough to overcome any tendency to see the reusable nose rags as gross or unsanitary. We'd also need to arrange the handkerchiefs in the box so that every time one was pulled, a new one would pop up in its place, just like with tissues. Or, alternatively, we could use an open-topped container for the clean hankies and the box with the narrow aperture for storing the used ones, as shown in this Instructable.

When I put this idea to Brian, he suggested taking it a step further: offer the hankies to guests and let them keep them if they liked. Of course, doing this would whittle down our collection over time, but considering that we've been working on the same box of disposable tissues for somewhere between two and six years, those 108 handkerchiefs should last a pretty long time. And we might even make a few converts to the culture of reuse along the way.

Quick updates

On this blog, I tend to focus on what's new and different in our ecofrugal life. This makes sense, but it has a downside: you hear the beginnings of a lot of stories without hearing the endings. I tell you that I've tried a new homemade conditioner, but I don't think to tell you that it turned out not to work all that well with everyday use. I tell you that we've added a strawberry bed to our garden, but I don't remember to follow up and tell you whether we got any actual strawberries out of it. 

So for this week's blog entry, instead of telling you what's new, I'm going to fill you in on the latest updates to some older stories. I'll start with the most recent stories and work my way backwards, so we're going from the smallest updates to the biggest ones.

Update #1: Potato plants

Last summer, when we got our new rain barrel, I mentioned that Brian was planning to use the old one to grow potatoes. We'd tried before to grow them in five-gallon buckets, but the results were disappointing. Brian thought that a bigger vessel, with plenty of room for the stems and tubers to form, might give us a better crop.

It's too early to say yet what our harvest will look like, but the plants themselves are flourishing in their new home. The stems have already reached the top of the barrel and are loaded with lush green foliage. They just recently flowered, as well. Brian snipped off the flowers because apparently you get more potato production that way, but I got a picture of them first. The trimmed-off blooms are now in the bud vase in our kitchen, so we've already gotten some benefit out of the plants regardless of how the potato crop turns out.

Update #2: Garden paths

Over the years we've had our garden, we've struggled to find a suitable covering for the paths between the beds. I thought I'd hit on the perfect solution with the leftover stone dust from our patio project, but within a year, weeds (and a few stray vegetable plants) were forcing their way through it. So, last winter, I decided to try a new approach: covering the paths with leaves. Using all the leaves we raked up in our own yard, as well as a bag or two of our neighbor's that we scavenged from the curb, we managed to cover all the paths a couple of inches deep.

This approach has been a moderate success. The blanket of leaves hasn't managed to suppress weeds entirely, but we're getting far fewer of them, and the ones that do pop up are easier to remove because they're rooted in loose, leafy soil rather than solid clay. (I'm only bothering to do this with the tall weeds, like crabgrass and dandelions. Ground-hugging weeds like barren strawberries, I figure, can just get walked on. If they pop up in the garden beds themselves, I'll yank them, but otherwise, they can stay where they are.) And since the leaves cost us nothing, we can simply keep replenishing them year after year.

Update #3: Strawberry bed

Last year was our first attempt at growing strawberries. Our new seed supplier offered seeds for the small Alpine variety, and we decided on a whim to add a packet to our order. The plants grew faster than we expected, and we actually managed to get a small handful of fruit off them that first year. But this year, they have really come into their own. The plants are flourishing, and we have already harvested 6 cups of tiny red and white fruits. (They're supposed to be red and yellow, but it's a very pale yellow. Alongside our honeyberries, which ripen around the same time, they make a very patriotic-looking fruit salad.) 

These little berries aren't as plump and juicy as regular strawberries. Their flavor is more concentrated, with a sort of floral undertone to it. They also don't keep nearly as well, which explains why you don't tend to see them in stores. We have to eat them up within a day or two of picking or they turn into mush. This means we can't use really use them in recipes, since we only get a cup or so of berries with each picking, and we can't save them up to get enough for a fruit crisp or a batch of jam. But eating them fresh every day (by themselves or in salads) is certainly no hardship.

So, all in all, I'd consider this experiment a success. The question now is, how long can we keep it going? According to the seed packet, these plants will only remain productive for about two years. But other sources on Alpine strawberries recommend dividing the plants "every four or five years" to keep production high and prevent overcrowding. That suggests that we should be able to expect them to last another couple of years at least. I guess we'll keep an eye on them next spring, and if it looks like they're not coming up, we can pick up a few strawberry plants of the more conventional type to replace them.

Update #4: Homemade deodorant

Over the years, I've tried various alternatives to commercial deodorant in an attempt to avoid both animal testing and excess packaging. Plain baking soda, vinegar, rubbing alcohol, and peroxide didn't work very well; milk of magnesia did but turned out to have an undesirable laxative side effect. The best of the bunch was alcohol-based hand sanitizer; it wasn't strong enough to keep me fresh as a daisy on hot summer days, but it was good enough for light activity in mild weather. 

However, this sanitizer deodorant had a few drawbacks. It still produced some plastic waste; the bottle was recyclable, but the pump top wasn't. Also, annoyingly, the pump was never able to extract all the sanitizer from the bottle, and it also made it impossible to turn the bottle upside down to get the last drops. And it became difficult to obtain during the pandemic, though I was able to get by with a homemade version made from rubbing alcohol and aloe vera gel.

So when I came across a recipe for another homemade deodorant with just three ingredients—one part baking soda, two parts cornstarch, and three parts coconut oil—I thought it was worth a try. True, straight baking soda hadn't worked that well for me, but neither had straight rubbing alcohol, yet the alcohol-based gel worked fine. In any case, it wouldn't cost much to mix up a small batch and test it out.

Well, as it turns out, this baking soda mixture works at least as well as the hand sanitizer. Like the sanitizer, it doesn't always last all day, but it's no big deal to reapply it. It also produces no plastic waste whatsoever, and it's easy to get every last drop of it out of the container. And it's cheap—less than 25 cents for that initial batch (6 tablespoons total), which has already kept me going for a few weeks and is nowhere near running out. Can't get much more ecofrugal than that!

Update #5: Patio furniture

Back in 2013, we furnished our DIY patio with a cheap patio set from IKEA. At $120 for a table and four chairs, it was a much better deal than anything available at Home Depot or Lowe's, where outdoor furniture sets started at around $500. We refinished it once in 2014, but after that we decided to just live with the weathered look.

After 11 years of use, though, the furniture was starting to have problems with more than just its appearance. The pieces had become rickety, wobbling noticeably when we sat down, and tightening the bolts didn't solve the problem. We finally concluded that we were going to need a replacement.

The obvious place to look for one was Craigslist, which we now prefer to IKEA for home furnishings. But there was a snag: unlike IKEA furniture, pieces on Craigslist come fully assembled. How would we fit a whole patio set into our little Honda Fit?

The answer: we didn't. We already knew we'd have to rent a truck at some point to haul home the lumber for our laundry room renovation (which, yes, is still in progress) and for another project that Brian wants to do outdoors (more on that one in a future post). So, once we'd booked the truck for that, we took advantage of the opportunity to haul home a $135 patio set from Craigslist as well. We were still able to get the truck back by the end of the day, so the rental fee was the same; all it cost us was a little extra for gas.

Our new patio set is superior in almost every way to our old one. The glass-topped table is larger and includes a center hole where we can add a patio umbrella, should we ever feel the need for one. The chairs, with their woven plastic seats, are quite comfortable even with no added cushions. And both table and chairs are made of materials that should stand up better to the elements than our old wooden pieces. The previous owner had already kept them outdoors for several summers, and the table during the winters as well, and they're all still in good shape. So, given the same treatment, this new set should serve us for many years to come.

More ecofrugal episodes

Once again, we've been having some ups and downs in our ecofrugal life this week. Rather than recount these ecofrugal episodes in chronological order, I think I'll arrange them from most disappointing to most satisfying. That way I'll be able to end the post on a nice positive note. 

Thus, we'll start at the bottom, with:

Ecofrugal Episode 1: The Earth Fair Washout

I spent most of this afternoon "tabling"—that is, setting up a table and talking to people—for Citizens' Climate Lobby at a street fair in town. Unfortunately, the event was a bit of a washout—literally. The weather was chilly and wet, progressing from clouds and drizzle in the morning to steady, soaking rain in the afternoon. Fortunately we had a canopy to keep us dry while we were actually at the table, but we got pretty wet whenever we ventured away from it. By the time we finished putting away all our gear at the end of the event—including the canopy itself—we were all pretty well soaked.

Furthermore, there were fewer people to talk to than there would usually be, since many people were sensibly staying home and keeping dry. All in all, we had about 30 conversations over the course of four hours—five if you count the time we spent setting up and putting away all our gear—and only a few of those could be considered enthusiastic. It's not a lot to show for the amount of effort we put in. 

On top of that, we had to put up with a lot of other annoyances unrelated to the weather. The organizers of the Earth Fair put our booth into a slot right next to the music stage, so we couldn't converse at normal volumes. The parking lot they told us to use for unloading our gear was completely filled up five minutes before the time they told us to arrive, and we weren't allowed to use the nearby bank parking lot—not even for the few minutes required to unload—because it was reserved for an EV car show. (Fortunately, we'd already unloaded our car by the time they told us this; otherwise we would have had to find a parking spot on the street and then haul all our gear several blocks to the site.) Given how much hassle we went to for such a small benefit, I'm inclined to think it's not even worth signing up for this event next year.

Ecofrugal Episode 2: The Case of the Compacted Soil

Yesterday was our big spring planting day in the garden. We put in seeds for twelve squares of beans, four of cucumbers, six of basil, and two of herbs, and we transplanted eight tomato seedlings and four peppers. This proved to be a much harder job than I expected—literally. I'd expected to just poke some holes in the dirt and put the seeds in, but the soil was so dense and compacted that I could barely get the blade of a trowel into it, much less my fingers. I had to spend several minutes hacking at the soil in each square to break up the clods of clay before I could put the seeds into it.

This is both puzzling and frustrating, because we've had these raised garden beds for about fifteen years at this point, and we've spent that whole time following the advice in all our garden books about building healthy soil. We double-dug the beds when we first built them, turning over all the soil twice to break it up, and we haven't tilled it or walked on it since then. We add compost to it every year during spring planting and mulch the beds with leaves in the winter. And we've never once used any sort of harsh synthetic fertilizer or pesticide. By now, our soil ought to be so rich and soft we could plunge our hands right into it, not packed so hard we can barely dig in it.

Based on all the sources I've consulted, the best explanation I can find is that we're not adding enough organic matter to the beds. Our little home compost bin only provides enough compost to add a thin layer—less than one inch—to each of the beds each year, and we should be piling on at least a couple of inches. Bagged compost isn't an ideal solution either, since we would need to buy several bags and then test every one of them to make sure the contents weren't herbicide-laden "killer compost" that would kill our plants. If any of the bags failed the test, we'd have to buy new ones and test them too, repeating the process until we got only clean results. But that would seriously delay our planting schedule, so to avoid the problem, we'd have to buy a lot more compost than we thought we needed—at least twice as much—in the hope that at least one bag in two would be usable. 

Probably the best solution is to go to the Belle Mead Co-Op every year and load up with half a yard of bulk leaf mold. We haven't been using this stuff regularly because we learned that it's not actually a great source of soil nutrients, but it should be effective as an amendment to loosen up the soil, hold moisture, and attract earthworms. The only problem with this plan is that we can't do this at the same time we buy mulch because there isn't room in our car, or our garden shed, for both at once. So probably we should either buy a load of mulch every spring and a load of leaf mold every fall or vice versa.

Ecofrugal Episode 3: The Case of the Disappearing Eggs

One of the things that made Lidl an instant hit with Brian and me was its prices on Certified Humane (CH) eggs. We used to buy these at H-Mart, where sale prices ranged from $2 to $4 per dozen. But at Lidl, we consistently found them for $2.40 a dozen. Even during the pandemic, when most food prices soared, this price held steady. We did encounter occasional shortages, during which we'd go in and find the CH-egg shelf empty, but we figured these were due to temporary blockages in the supply chain. The eggs were always back a week or so later, so we didn't worry too much about it.

But in the past month or two, Lidl's CH eggs seem to have disappeared entirely. The case where they live is still there, with the price on it marked at $2.40 a dozen, but every time we show up, it's empty. Brian guessed this could mean that the store's delivery cycle has changed, so that the eggs now arrive on Friday morning, and consequently they're always gone when we show up on Thursday evening. (We found a little support for this theory last week, when we showed up a little earlier on Thursday and found exactly one carton of eggs in the case, with one of them smashed. Clearly it hadn't been sitting there all week, so it was most likely the last one left, passed over on account of the damage.) But given how full our schedule is this spring, we haven't found an opportunity to go to Lidl at some other time and check.

For a while, this problem left us stranded without a good source of CH eggs. The $8 per dozen at the farmers' market was much too rich for our blood; we hunted around at other local food stores, but none of them—not even our once-trusty H-Mart—could do much better than $5 per dozen. (Trader Joe's, we discovered, didn't carry them at all; it had only "cage free" eggs, a much wimpier standard.) And then it occurred to us to check the refrigerated case at Rite Aid, which carries a small selection of dairy products. To our astonishment, not only did the store carry CH eggs, they were only $3.20 per dozen—about 35 percent less than their nearest competitor.

We don't know how a drugstore chain, of all places, manages to offer humanely farmed eggs at better prices than any local supermarket. But we're pleased to have a new source of eggs so close to home. We'll still keep checking the Lidl when we visit to see if our cheaper eggs have returned, but we won't need to rearrange our whole shopping schedule in the hopes of catching them there.

Ecofrugal Episode 4: A Reusable Replacement

My favorite way to brew coffee, hands-down, is the Aeropress. It's much faster than a drip machine, uses much less ground coffee to brew the same volume, and produces excellent coffee from fairly cheap beans. It's also much easier to clean than the French press so beloved by coffee snobs. All the grounds get compacted into a dense little puck that you can shoot directly out into the compost bin, so all you have to do is rinse off the plunger. 

The Aeropress has only two downsides. First, it takes a lot of effort to depress the plunger; I often have to put my full weight on it for a minute or so before it finally sinks. And second, it's not completely zero-waste. The paper filters it uses are fairly tiny and cost only a couple of cents each, and they can go straight into the compost bin with the coffee grounds, so the waste it produces is fairly minimal. But still, I have thought from time to time that it would be still more ecofrugal to replace those paper filters with a resusable one.

So, when I noticed that I was running low on paper filters, I decided this was my chance to give it a try. This was an easier decision to make since the paper filters had gone up in price, from $6 for a pack of 350 to between $8 and $10, not counting shipping. By contrast, a set of two reusable metal filters from a site called Mason Jar Lifestyle was only $10 ($14 with shipping). The price was barely any higher, and I'd have two filters to experiment with and see which I preferred. And if it turned out they were both unacceptable, I'd still have time to switch back to the paper ones.

Having now tried both filters, I can say they have both advantages and disadvantages compared to the paper ones. Most obviously, they're more ecofrugal; they produce no waste and should last for years, making them much cheaper on a per-cup basis. They also let more air through than the paper ones, which reduces the amount of muscle needed to depress the plunger. This is particularly noticeable with the perforated metal disk rather than the fine mesh one.

One downside of these metal filters is that they allow more sediment into the coffee than the paper  ones. However, this isn't a huge problem, particularly with the fine-mesh disk. A much bigger drawback is the extra cleanup work. Removing the filter from the press before knocking the grounds out into the bin doesn't sound like that much added hassle, and it wouldn't be if the filter came away cleanly. But no matter how carefully I pry it off (after running cold water over it so it's cool enough to touch), at least half the coffee grounds end up stuck to the filter rather than the press. And unlike the grounds stuck to the plunger itself, they don't come off cleanly. If I simply rinsed them off the filter, I'd be washing several grams of coffee grounds down the drain with every cup of coffee I brew, and I think it wouldn't be long before our plumbing objected to that. I've tried scraping the grounds off the filter onto the plunger before emptying it, but that never works neatly. Some grounds stay stuck to the filter no matter what I do, and some get all over my hands, so they have to be washed too.

I consulted Reddit on this subject and found two suggestions for dealing with this problem. Some users say that sliding the metal filter off sideways rather than lifting it off removes most of the grounds. Others say pulling the plunger back slightly and then inverting the press and letting it rest (without unscrewing the cap first) allows the grounds to drop back onto the plunger and away from the filter, leaving it mostly clean. I'll give both methods a try, and if either one works, then I'll be able to say definitively that the mesh filter is superior to the paper ones. 

[UPDATE, 5/5/24: I have now tried both methods of cleaning the metal filter. Neither one is perfect, but the first is much better than the second. When I invert the plunger and let it rest before removing the cap, the grounds do not fall away from the filter; they remain stuck to it at the top. When I remove the cap, some of the grounds fall off onto the top of the plunger, but at least half remain on the filter:

By contrast, when I rinse the plunger, unscrew the cap, and slide off the filter, it leaves only a thin film of coffee grounds behind. A quick spray with the faucet hose is enough to get them off. And I'm not concerned that the amount of coffee washing down the drain will clog it up.

I've also discovered another advantage of the metal filter: it fits more securely than the paper ones. With those, I always had to take care that the filter was exactly centered in the cap before screwing it on. If it wasn't, it would slip to the side and let some of the grounds through into my cup of coffee. I'd have to strain it a second time before I could drink it. 

So, in addition to saving me money and eliminating waste, this metal mesh filter has eliminated the two biggest problems with my Aeropress: the stuck-plunger problem and the slipping-filter problem. The additional step of rinsing the filter is a small price to pay for that.]

[FURTHER UPDATE, 9/13/24: I've now figured out that the best method of all for cleaning the filter is to combine the two suggestions. After rinsing the press and unscrewing the filter basket, I pull the plunger back slightly so the metal filter is flush with the bottom of the tube before sliding it off. This takes only a few seconds and leaves almost nothing stuck to the filter.]

Ecofrugal Episode 5: A Pressing Concern

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I had ordered us a new (or more accurately, new-to-us) garlic press to replace our old Oxo one that broke. After a little research, we decided to go with the Joseph Joseph Garlic Rocker, which got consistently solid reviews from cooking sites. A new one costs $15 at Amazon, but since we don't do Amazon, we bought a secondhand one from eBay for $14 ($17 with shipping).

It has since arrived, and after testing it out several times, Brian reports that it's better in almost every way than its predecessor. It takes a couple of passes over a garlic clove to mince it as finely as the old one, but on the plus side, it does mince the entire clove rather than extruding part of it and turning the rest into a sort of squashed blob. It's easier to clean than the old press and takes up less room in the drawer. And since it's a solid piece of metal with no moving parts, we can be confident it won't simply fall apart like the previous one.

This espisode makes me inclined to add a seventh principle to my Ecofrugal Manifesto: Buy It to Last. (You could call this a subset of my sixth principle—Mend It, Don't End It—but I think it's different enough to deserve a principle of its own.) If you have to buy something new, buy something that's built to last as long as possible. Look for sturdy materials and construction, check reviews for complaints about durability, and minimize the number of moving parts that can break. And, other things being equal, opt for mechanical rather than electronic controls whenever possible. Electronics of all kinds usually cost more to repair than to replace—if it's possible to replace them at all.

What we're doing for Earth Day

This year, Earth Day overlaps with the start of Passover—which means, ironically, that we're going to spend it being a little less ecofrugal than usual. Normally we wouldn't drive anywhere on a Monday; Brian would either bike to work or work from home. But tomorrow, we'll have to drive to get to my parents' house for the Seder, and since my family isn't kosher, that meal will include both meat and dairy (a free-range chicken for dinner and ice cream with fruit compote for dessert). And our menu for the following week will also include more meat and dairy than usual, since many of the Passover-friendly recipes we know include either one or the other. 

Fortunately, Brian and I are making up for that by increasing our efforts in the lead-up to Earth Day itself. Over the past week or so, our earth-friendly activities have included:

1. Trying a new vegan restaurant. Last weekend, we went to a show with some friends in the nearby town of Metuchen, and they suggested meeting for dinner beforehand. I did a little investigation online to find a vegetarian-friendly restaurant in Metuchen and discovered one called Red's Leaf Cafe where the menu is 100 percent vegan. The place is quite small, with just a handful of tables, but everything we ordered—the shared oyster mushroom appetizer, Brian's sesame seitan, my orange lion's mane mushrooms over coconut rice—was very tasty. Unfortunately, it was also pretty pricey; the bill for our party of four, including tip, came to $160. So I don't think we'll want to visit there on a regular basis, but if we have guests we want to impress, it could be worth another trip.
2. My monthly Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL) meeting. Most months, this group holds its monthly meeting on Tuesday night, with only a few people meeting in person and the rest joining via Zoom. This month, for a change, it met at a Unitarian church in Somerville on Saturday afternoon. (Brian helped make my trip up there more eco-friendly by driving me there and spending the time while I was at my meeting running errands in town.) My favorite part of the meeting was watching the monthly presentation from CCL's national organization, which featured an interesting speaker: Ernesto Alcantar of Potential Energy, the self-described "marketing team for planet Earth." His presentation focused on eight principles for having productive conversations about climate with people who don't live in our climate-activist bubble. His tips include "talking like a human" (avoiding jargon like "carbon footprint" and even "greenhouse gas"), avoiding partisanship, and focusing on "humans, not concepts."
3. More visible mending. After my success fixing the holes in Brian's socks with Scotch darning, I decided to try a new technique called honeycomb darning for reinforcing some worn areas that didn't have holes yet. This method involves putting in a series of blanket stitches running all around the edge of the worn spot, then looping through those stitches to add another row of stitches farther in, and repeating the process until you get to the middle. This video on YouTube does a good job of explaining the process, including what to do with the dangling "tail threads" at the end. One thing it doesn't show is what to do if, like me, you misjudge how much thread you need and end up running out before you've finished the job. I had to guess how to work in a new piece of thread to pick up where the first one ran out. But I later found a second video on the same subject that does show what to do, and its method is pretty much the same as mine, so apparently I guessed right.
4. Joining a stream cleanup. Several members of our CCL chapter took part in the Raritan Headwaters 34th Annual Stream Cleanup yesterday. (Since this blog is technically social media, I'll throw in the tags @raritanheadwaters and #RHAstreamcleanup here.) The area we were assigned to was Spruce Run Recreation Area in Clinton, which is actually along a reservoir rather than a stream. Our team of seven didn't go into or near the water itself; instead we donned yellow vests and combed the verge along a half-mile stretch of road near the park entrance. By far the most common type of trash we found was cigarette butts—over 150 of them—followed by plastic bottles and wrappers. (Little mini liquor bottles and cigarette butts were particularly likely to be found together.) The most unusual item we found was a piece of hardware that no one in our group, or in the larger group running the event, could identify. It's a...well, some sort of knob bolted to some sort of hinge, sort of? If you can figure out what it's for, please let me know.
5. Secondhand shopping. The stream cleanup happened to fall on the same day as the town-wide yard sales in Metuchen, so we couldn't spend the entire day strolling around and browsing sales as we normally would. But after coming home and having some lunch, we headed up to Metuchen to get in a couple of hours of yard-saling in the afternoon. Between the huge rummage sale at the First Presbyterian Church and a few other sales we visited in that same neighborhood, we managed to pick up three items of interest—a Fairport Convention CD, a peacock-blue T-shirt for me, and a Ngaio Marsh mystery—for $2.50 total. (Unfortunately, we then spent twice that amount at a local cafe on a cup of coffee for me, since I was practically falling asleep on my feet after our early morning and busy day.) Not a very impressive haul, but I followed up on it just now by ordering us a secondhand garlic press on eBay to replace the one that just fell apart as Brian was cooking dinner. (Since this one has a one-piece "rocker" design, with no moving parts, we know it won't break like its predecessor. And The Spruce Eats says it can mince ginger, too.)

Add all that in to our everyday earth-friendly activities, such as eating meatless meals, hanging our laundry, and Brian's regular bicycle commute, and I'd say we're not doing too badly.

24 hours of plastic

About a year ago, a New York Times journalist named A.J. Jacobs tried to go for an entire day without touching or using anything made of plastic. Spoiler alert: he did not succeed. 

It certainly wasn't for lack of trying, since he went to extraordinary lengths to identify and avoid plastics. He went all day without not only his smartphone but also his eyeglasses. He ordered all-new plastic-free toiletries and clothing. He made all his purchases with coins (since even paper bills contain some plastic), brought his own chair on the subway, and filtered all his drinking water to remove microplastics. And despite these heroic efforts, he still ended up making contact with plastic 164 times over the course of the day. 

At the time, this experiment struck me as pretty pointless. Sure, it did a good job of showing how ubiquitous plastic is in the modern world, but it seemed to treat that fact as an unmitigated evil. The author lumped all plastics together in a single category, making no effort to distinguish "stupid plastic" (unnecessary, single-use items, such as bags and takeout containers) from useful plastics that make our lives better (like a pair of glasses that enables you to see clearly). Not only was his effort to eliminate them all from his life doomed to failure, it wouldn't have accomplished anything useful if he had succeeded.

But as silly as I found the whole exercise, somehow I couldn't get it out of my head. In the year since the article came out, I've frequently found myself wondering how I'd handle this same challenge. If I absolutely had to go 24 hours without touching plastic, could I do it? How hard would it be? And how much would the planet actually benefit from it?

Although these questions piqued my curiosity, I wasn't prepared to go to the same lengths as Jacobs to answer them. Instead, I decided to tackle the problem from the other direction. Rather than trying to go a day without plastic, I'd keep a record of an entire day with plastic, noting every time I touched or used it over a 24-hour period. At the end of the day, I'd look at the list and try to figure out what it would require to avoid each of my contacts with plastic—assuming it would even be possible—and what it would cost. Then I'd weigh the costs against the environmental benefits to figure out what steps, if any, would be worth taking to address the plastic problem beyond what I'm doing now.

I conducted this experiment last Monday, and according to my calculations, I had a total of 87 encounters with plastic over the course of the day. I'll sort these according to where and when they occurred:

• In the bedroom upon first getting up: My pajamas (fleece pants and a sweatshirt), hat, slippers, and eyeglasses. (They have metal frames, but the stems are plastic-coated, and so are the nose pads.) Also, a blanket on my bed that I've had since childhood and is probably made of acrylic, though I'm not 100 percent sure. (The rest of the bedding is cotton, and I didn't count the synthetic mattress cover or pillow stuffing, since they never touched my skin.)
  
• In the bathroom after getting up: The plastic insert on the soap dish, three bottles containing my daily medications, the bathroom cup, my Snap toothbrush, the toothpaste tube, a tube of lotion that I used on my itchy back, and the old silicone spatula I used to apply it. (Unlike Jacobs, I didn't need to touch plastic to use the toilet, which has a wooden seat and a metal flush handle.)
• In the kitchen, preparing and eating breakfast: The handle of the teakettle, the knobs on the stove, the buttons on the toaster oven and microwave, the soy milk carton, the cap on the vanilla bottle, the plastic container that holds our homemade plant butter, my cell phone (which I got out to do my daily puzzles), my wallet (which contained the phone), my purse (which contained the wallet), and the pen that I used to write all these plastic encounters down. And, after breakfast, my Aeropress coffee maker, the lid of the coffee can, the salt shaker, and the cinnamon bottle. (I add a smidgen of each to my coffee when brewing it.)
• In my office: My computer keyboard and mouse and a thermal-paper receipt that I retrieved from my wallet and filed.
• In the bathroom, during and after my shower: My bathrobe, the tub mat, the shower curtain liner (not the curtain itself, which is 100 percent cotton), the plastic-coated basket that holds my toiletries, the jar of oil in which I store my razor, the silicone scrubber pads that I use on my body and face, the bottle that holds my homemade face wash, the shower squeegee, the window shade, the microfiber towel I use on my hair, my conditioner bottle, four tubes and pots containing medications and moisturizers I apply to my face and body, and my mini microcurrent device. (I can't bring myself to spend thousands of dollars on "tweakments" to fight the signs of aging, but $150 for something to give me just a little lift seemed like a reasonable price to pay.)
• In the bedroom, getting dressed: The bottle of homemade hand sanitizer I use as a deodorant and my underwear, bra, socks, long johns, jeans, and pullover sweater. (The turtleneck I wore underneath the pullover was a cotton/rayon blend, and my winter cardigan is 100 percent wool with wooden buttons.)
• In the kitchen, preparing and eating lunch: The refrigerator (handle and produce drawers), the plastic lid on a Pyrex container of leftovers, a jar of homemade "spaghetti salt" (a Parmesan substitute made from nutritional yeast and salt), a mesh bag containing mandarin oranges, a Ziploc bag containing a homemade cookie, and the telephone because someone called while I was eating. (I also touched the microwave to heat up my leftovers, but I'd already counted that.)
• Going out for a walk: My winter coat, boots, gloves, scarf, and sunglasses.
• In the kitchen, preparing my afternoon snack: The popcorn jar, the bag of nutritional yeast, a measuring cup, the oil sprayer, and our Brita pitcher.
• In the bathroom and kitchen, before dinner: A bottle of magnesium supplements, our pill splitter, and a microwaveable heating pad I used to warm myself up. 
• Board-game night at Pino's, a local bar: Cash to pay for a cocktail and the dice, laminated sheets, and wet-erase markers from our Quixx game. (All the other games I played contained only cardboard or wooden pieces.)
• In the kitchen, before bed: The bread box, which I opened to fix myself some toast for a bedtime snack.
• In the bathroom, before bed: A couple of medicine bottles and tubes I hadn't touched previously, a container of dental floss, and the floss itself. 

Going over this list, I can see several plastic contacts that I could have hacked my way around for purposes of a one-day experiment. For instance, I could have removed all my pills and supplements for the day from their plastic bottles and transferred them to a bowl. Similarly, I could have removed a small dose of every topical product I used from its container and put them in an array of little glass jars. And I could have removed all the food I planned to eat that day from its plastic packaging ahead of time so I wouldn't have to touch any plastic to eat it. But none of these hacks would have done anything to reduce the amount of plastic we actually consume. They'd allow me to avoid touching plastic on that particular day, but they wouldn't get it out of our home or our lives.

To make a real difference to the planet, I'd have to replace these plastic-packaged items with versions that were truly plastic-free. But in most cases, that wouldn't be feasible. All of the medications I get from my online pharmacy come in standardized plastic bottles; there's simply no way to get the meds without the plastic. The supplements that come from the drugstore are likewise sold in plastic bottles, and I've never seen them for sale in any other kind of packaging. And the same problem applies to most of the commercial foodstuffs I used. The Whole Earth Center sells nutritional yeast and cinnamon out of bulk bins, and we do actually buy them there if we ever happen to be in Princeton when the store is open. But to buy them that way all the time would require making a special trip to Princeton, and I suspect the emissions from our car would outweigh the ecological benefits of avoiding a couple of little plastic bags. (To be fair, I could buy coffee from our local roastery. But even in bulk, it would cost me $20 a pound.)

There are some plastic items on my list that I could, at a cost, replace with plastic-free ones. A quick search of the Zero Waste Store turns up several. But in most cases, it's not clear that these plastic-free items are any greener than what I'm using now. For instance:

• A plastic-free, corn-based soap dish insert costs $5.99. But is that really superior to our homemade soap dish insert, made from plastic waste that would otherwise have gone into the trash?
• A bamboo toothbrush with bristles made from castor bean oil costs $3.99. With the "subscribe & save" option, it's only $3.19, which isn't that much more than the replacement heads for our Snap toothbrush. But according to the most comprehensive study I've seen, it's not actually greener.
• A jar of 62 toothpaste tablets costs $10.89. Not only is that far more expensive than our Trader Joe's toothpaste, studies show it's not as green because of the ingredients used and the size of each tablet. (And since when is "fluoride-free" a selling point?)
• Conditioner bars cost $15.99 each for "75+ washes." That sounds good, but it's way more costly than my Suave conditioner, and all the bars contain glycerin, which my hair hates. (I've made several attempts at making my own conditioner, but even the most successful recipe I tried didn't work for very long.)
• A 30-meter roll of bamboo-based dental floss in a little glass jar costs $9.99, with two refills available for $13.99. Even the refills are more than five times the cost of drugstore floss. And while it has a carbon footprint somewhat smaller than plastic floss, it does worse on other environmental measures, like ozone depletion and metal/mineral use.
  

Then there are the non-disposable items on my list, like clothing and kitchen tools. It would certainly be possible to replace most of my clothes with garments made from 100 percent natural fibers. However, I'd probably be unable to find them at thrift stores and would have to buy them new. Moreover, some of them, like socks and undies, probably wouldn't be available in stores and would have to be ordered from a specialty brand like Cottonique.

I could likewise get new glass containers with bamboo lids, instead of plastic ones, for our leftovers and replace the zip-top plastic bags we use (and reuse) for cookies with silicone bags. I could replace my plastic oil sprayer with a metal Misto sprayer (which doesn't work as well), the Aeropress with a plastic-free French press (which uses more ground coffee per cup and is harder to clean), and the Brita pitcher with a glass pitcher and Kishu filters. I could get a glass salt shaker and a wooden-handled teakettle. I could replace the polyester shower curtain liner with a $50 linen one and get myself an organic cotton hair towel (a relative bargain at only $14.99). And I could replace my plastic refillable pen with a metal fountain pen (though I appear to be physically incapable of writing neatly with one).

But here's the rub: the plastic-containing versions of these items are already in our possession. To make them plastic-free, we'd have to purchase new items and discard (or at least give away) the ones we currently have. That does not strike me as an eco-friendly choice. 

And finally, there are the big-ticket items on the list: the computer, the phone, the kitchen appliances, and my eyeglasses. These, I feel confident in saying, simply do not come in plastic-free versions. The only way to avoid plastic with these would be not to use them at all, and that would be utterly impractical.

The upshot appears to be that for me, a plastic-free life wouldn't really be a greener one. Sure, maybe we could make more of an effort to fit in trips to the Whole Earth Center or other stores with bulk bins. And maybe when some of our plastic-containing items wear out, it might be worth looking into plastic-free alternatives to replace them (though we might still end up deciding that the products we use now are the most ecofrugal choice). But for the most part, the plastic in our life is not stupid plastic. We've already harvested all the low-hanging fruit in this area, such as single-use bags, straws, and takeout containers, and the plastics that remain are the ones we've decided are worth the trade-offs.

Do I really need a bidet?

From time to time on this blog, I've talked about the idea of getting a bidet to reduce or eliminate our toilet paper use. Every time, I've concluded that it wouldn't be worth it. We spend so little on toilet paper that it couldn't possibly save us that much money, and since we use the recycled stuff, it wouldn't save trees either. So I decided the benefits of a bidet wouldn't outweigh the costs, and that was the end of it.

Except the Internet doesn't want to let that be the end of it. Since the start of the pandemic and the ensuing TP shortages, I keep seeing articles everywhere—from the Washington Post's Climate Coach, from the New York Times' Wirecutter, from Consumer Reports—singing the praises of bidets. And it seems like virtually every thread on Reddit about either sustainability or frugality (or, really, almost anything) eventually gets hijacked by bidet fanatics going on and on about how this little device has changed their lives and implying that mine will never be complete without one. It's like some kind of weird plumbing cult.

So I decided I needed to look into this issue in more depth. Am I truly missing out, and/or harming the planet, by stubbornly sticking to my Trader Joe's TP? Or is it the pro-bidet claims that don't, so to speak, hold water?

The pro-bidet crowd makes four main arguments in their favor, which I'll tackle one by one:

1. The financial argument

Many bidet fanciers claim that a bidet will pay for itself in months or even weeks because of all the money it saves you on toilet paper. To back up this assertion, they offer a wide range of statistics about the "average" American's toilet paper use, ranging from 3 rolls per week to 2 rolls per day. (How is that even possible?) The figure I'm most inclined to trust comes from Statista: 141 rolls per person per year. (This is based on a weight of 90 grams per roll; I just weighed one of ours and it's actually a bit smaller, at 80 grams.)

While this may indeed be accurate as an average, it's certainly not true for us. Last time I tracked our toilet paper use, I found that our family of two goes through roughly 68.5 rolls per year, just over 34 per person. Admittedly, I did this experiment at a time when Brian was working at the office five days a week rather than one or two. But according to Brian, even then, nearly all of his toilet paper use occurred at home. So even if he used, say, a dozen sheets per week at work, that only works out to around two and a half rolls per year. That means our TP usage now comes out to roughly 71 rolls per year.

The toilet paper we buy at Trader Joe's has also gone up a bit in price since the time of my experiment, from $4.50 per dozen to $4.99. But at 71 rolls per year, that still puts our annual TP cost at only around $29.50. According to Consumer Reports, the cheapest available bidet attachments cost around $30, so there's literally no way one could pay for itself in less than a year. And Wirecutter's top-rated bidet seat, the $400 Toto Washlet, would take over 13 years to pay for itself—assuming it lasted that long.

That's also assuming that a bidet would eliminate our use of toilet paper entirely. However, it's by no means clear that it would. There's widespread disagreement online about whether a bidet is a replacement for paper or merely a supplement to it. Some folks say they use the bidet first to wash, followed by toilet paper to dry off; others say they wipe first, then use the bidet to get fully clean. Several bidet users interviewed by Consumer Reports said they used less toilet paper since getting it; one said it had cut their family's TP use by about half, while others said they use "up to 80 percent less." If our experience was the same, a bidet would only save us between $15 and $24 per year and would take 1.3 to two years, minimum, to pay for itself.

Except there's one more problem: A bidet would add to our household's annual water use. Each use consumes about two cups of water. If we both used it every time we sat on the toilet, that would be, according to my rough calculations, about 24 cups (1.5 gallons) of water per day. (I'm estimating that we each use it twice a day for a bowel movement and I use it an additional eight times a day to urinate. If we used the bidet for bowel movements only, it would consume only about half a gallon of water per day, but it would also eliminate no more than one-third of our toilet paper use.) 

We don't pay for our household water by the gallon; our town uses a tiered system, and our quarterly water usage is generally low enough to put us into the lowest tier, up to 799 cubic feet. But not by much. Particularly in the summertime, we often get up into the 700s and occasionally even top the 800 mark, bumping us up to the next tier and costing us an extra $23.44. If we were using a bidet regularly, that extra 1.5 gallons per day would make it that much trickier to stay in the bottom tier. If it bumped us up into a higher tier even once per year, that would erase all or most of our TP savings.

In the absolute best-case scenario—we acquire a bidet for no more than $30, it saves us $24 a year on toilet paper, and it never bumps our water bill—it would pay for itself in 15 months. But it hardly seems like it would be worth the hassle for such a small savings. Which brings us to...

2. The environmental argument

The main reason "you need a bidet," according to the Climate Coach, is "to reduce clear-cutting mature forests." Millions of trees, the article claims, go to satisfy American's gluttonous need for toilet paper and our pigheaded refusal to switch to bidets. But once again, this doesn't really apply to us, since our TJ's TP is made from 100 percent recycled paper, with a minimum of 80 percent post-consumer recycled content. (N.b: that means it's made from other kinds of paper, not toilet paper that's been recycled post-flush.) 

Now, tree pulp isn't the only resource that goes into making toilet paper. Treehugger argues that the best reason to use a bidet is because, ironically, they save water. "Paper making is incredibly water-intensive," the article claims, and the wastewater from the process creates "a flood of organic waste and chemical residue which must be processed or, worse yet absorbed, after being treated and dumped into some unlucky river or ocean."

But here, again, it's not clear that the math works out in favor of bidets. According to the Climate Coach, each roll of toilet paper requires about 6 gallons of water to produce. We take about 5 days to go through a roll of toilet paper, so that's 1.2 gallons per day. And according to my off-the-cuff calculations, switching to a bidet instead would use up 1.5 gallons per day—0.3 gallons more than just using paper.

In fact, it's probably even worse than that. When I clicked through to the Climate Coach's source for the 6-gallons-per-roll figure, an episode of the Possibly podcast, it said that "A roll made from 100% recycled materials uses half as much water." Thus, cleaning our butts with recycled TP uses only 0.6 gallons of water per day—less than half as much a bidet. In short, if the main purpose of using a bidet is to save water and trees, it looks like our recycled-fiber TP actually does significantly better.

[UPDATE, 2/15/24: I've since found some more reliable numbers on water use. A little further digging led me to the Environmental Paper Network's Paper Calculator, which you can use to calculate the environmental impact of various kinds of paper use. I punched in the weight of a 12-pack of our Trader Joe's TP (about 2.1 pounds) and selected "tissue" for the grade. It said this amount of paper would use 42.8 gallons of water—3.56 gallons per roll—if it contained no recycled paper content whatsoever (either pre- or post-consumer). If made with 100% recycled paper content, it would use only 22.5 gallons, or 1.875 gallons per roll. Thus, the amount of TP we go through in one day uses only 0.375 gallons to produce—one-quarter of the amount we'd use with a bidet. Thanks to the Handy Finch blog for helping me find this source.

Obligatory citation: Environmental impact estimates were made using the Environmental Paper Network Paper Calculator Version 4.0. For more information visit www.papercalculator.org.]

3. The hygiene argument

A lot of bidet users argue that it's simply not possible to clean your bum adequately with toilet paper alone. One analogy they're fond of using is, "If you got poop on your hand, would you just wipe it off with paper? No, of course not! You'd wash it off with water!"

My inclination is to respond to this with a snarky, "Well, that's because I pick things up with my hands, and I almost never pick anything up with my butt." But in the interests of fairness, I thought it was only right to look into this argument as well. Is a bidet really superior for cleaning?

Amazingly enough, it appears there are few to no scientific studies addressing this question. But as a colorectal surgeon interviewed by Smithsonian magazine points out, "It kind of doesn’t matter." Failing to get every last particle of poop off your bum will not in any way harm your health. There's some evidence that switching to a bidet may offer some relief for people who suffer from pruritus ani (itchy butthole) caused by over-wiping, but there's also evidence that "excessive" bidet use may cause this problem. Another expert interviewed by Smithsonian says a bidet may be helpful for people with specific disorders, such as Crohn's disease or physical disabilities that make wiping difficult, but those problems don't apply to us. In fact, for me, at least, a bidet would more likely do harm than good. Regularly using the "feminine wash" setting on a bidet to clean the lady parts can spread fecal bacteria to the vagina, which definitely isn't desirable. 

[UPDATE, 1/31/24: In the interest of fairness, I should add that a recent "Ask a Doctor" column in the Washington Post cited a 2022 study showing that bidet use doesn't just clean your butt better; it also greatly reduces the amount of bacteria on your hands after you wipe. A small sample group, 32 nursing students, wore clean gloves while using the toilet, and afterward the gloves were tested for microbe contamination. Result: the gloves of the TP users had nearly 10 times as many microbial colonies as the gloves of the bidet users. But here's the catch: as far as I can tell from the abstract, the volunteers did not wash their hands after wiping and before handing over the gloves to be tested. And in the real world, based on my observations in public restrooms, the overwhelming majority of people do wash their hands afterward, even if they don't always do it for the recommended 20 seconds. So I don't think this study provides much useful information about how clean the hands of TP users and bidet users are in real life.]

4. The hedonistic argument

In short, there's no sound reason for using a bidet to promote better health. But for most users, having a squeaky-clean bum isn't mainly about health; it's about happiness. Over and over, I see bidet lovers using phrases like "Once you've tried it, you'll never be able to go back to just paper" or "once you have one you feel like an animal not having it." (That latter one, by the way, was a response to a complaint about how annoying bidet evangelists are.) Some even say they can no longer stand to take a dump anywhere except at home.

Since I've never experienced this myself, it's not an argument I can refute. Maybe a sparkling clean butthole really is one of life's greatest pleasures, and I can't possibly say it isn't worth it without having tried it. But the same could be said about heroin, and I've never found that a compelling reason for trying it. Because the worst-case scenario wouldn't be that I didn't like it; it would be that I liked it so much I couldn't live without it.

This, for me, is the best argument against getting a bidet. I don't want to be a person who can't use a public restroom (or who needs to carry a portable bidet everywhere she goes) because she can't bear to clean up with paper. And even more than that, I don't want to become a person who is so enthralled with her bidet that she can't stop talking about it. I don't want to drive my friends, my family, and complete strangers on Reddit up the wall by telling them constantly why they need a bidet, and they may think they don't, but that's just because they haven't tried it, and once they do they won't know how they lived without it, and anyway it will pay for itself in a month and save the forests, and there's no way to get truly clean with just paper, and how can they stand to walk around with a dirty anus?

If I had found that a bidet truly had significant benefits for my health, my wallet, or the environment, I suppose I would have to bite the bullet and get one, even at risk of turning into an annoying bidet snob. But fortunately for me, none of these things appears to be the case. I'm not telling anyone who has a bidet and loves it that they should stop using it; I'm just saying I see no good reason to get one for myself, and I'd appreciate it if we could talk about something else.

Are consumers really responsible for consumerism?

I recently read a hand-wringing story in The Guardian about the problems of consumer culture. It starts by describing a visit the author, Chip Colwell, made to a huge landfill in Denver and his horror at seeing the literal mountains of trash created by "mass consumption." Feeling the need to do something about the problem, Colwell sat down with his family and worked out a plan for a "slow-buy year." During that year, each of them would purchase no more than five items beyond basic necessities (food, medicine, school and work supplies, and any parts needed for car repairs). They'd be allowed to accept gifts of material objects, though they were supposed to "discourage" others from giving them, but any gifts they bought for others would count toward their five-item limit.

Now, I'm all for being mindful about consumption, but this struck me as unreasonably extreme. I've seen, and even taken, challenges along similar lines, but they were much more limited. For instance, the Dress Retro challenge I'm taking this year requires me to purchase no more than three new garments—but that's only for clothing, and it doesn't include shoes, socks, underwear, or anything purchased secondhand. Under the rules of the Colwell family challenge, none of those exemptions would apply. 

Moreover, it struck me as problematic that the Colwells were taking it on themselves to fix what is, fundamentally, a social problem. It's the same problem I had with the Take the Jump Challenge and its requirement to give up personal vehicles: American society is designed around car use, and giving up my own car won't solve that problem. All it will do is make my own life considerably more difficult. And it's the same problem I had with the Climate Coach's advice to switch to zero-waste personal care products: the amount it would cost me to replace my conditioner, dental floss, and toothpaste with zero-waste versions is simply not a reasonable price to pay for the tiny amount of waste it would eliminate. Car dependency and plastic waste don't exist because of individual consumers making irresponsible choices: they exist because, for all practical purposes, we don't have any better choices. It's big business and big government that have shaped our society to look the way it does, and they're the ones who have the power and the responsibility to fix it.

Eventually, Colwell comes to the same conclusion. Six months into his family's yearlong experiment, when the project has been all but derailed by real life—a hole in his only pair of running shoes, a pen going through the laundry with most of his clothing, a new home—he feels a need for "bigger answers" that "don’t reframe just individual consumption, but how our larger world of consumerism operates." He speaks with scientists who point to the sheer scope of the waste problem (one estimates that there are around 250,000 tons of plastic) and say that addressing it is going to require fundamental changes in business and public policy. Even if Colwell's family produced no plastic waste whatsoever for an entire year, that would be a tiny drop in a very, very large bucket.

This doesn't mean that it's pointless for us as individuals to be conscious about our consumption. Even if my personal choices don't have a huge impact, every little bit helps—and more to the point, it helps keep me sane. When I've been calling Congress month after month about climate legislation with no result, it's a nice change of pace to focus on the little things that are within my control, like buying stuff secondhand. But that doesn't mean that I should beat myself up every time I give in and buy something new from the store. My small decisions aren't going to save the planet, and they aren't going to destroy it either.

What is Circular Monday?

Some time ago, I visited a site called Climate Hero to check my carbon footprint. (I like to check it on a variety of sites to see how they compare and get a wider range of suggestions for lowering it.) Ever since then, I've been getting occasional mailings from the site offering tips for cutting or offsetting my emissions. Most of these are stuff I already know, but this week I got an intriguing email telling me about something I'd never heard of before: Circular Monday.

Circular Monday, which is celebrated on the Monday before Thanksgiving, was conceived as an alternative to the consumer frenzy of Black Friday. Apparently, it was originally called White Monday, but the name got changed to something that better reflects its purpose, which is to promote the circular economy. A quick primer for those not familiar with this term: A circular economy is one in which all products can be broken down into their original components for reuse or recycling. This is in contrast to our current linear economy, in which most products are created from raw natural resources, used once, and then discarded in a landfill. (You can see a simple diagram of this model on the World Economic Forum website, or a much more complex one on the EPA site.) 

Now, this idea of a circular versus a linear economy isn't a simple matter of either-or. It's a question of degree. The more stuff gets reused, repaired, and recycled, the more circular the economy is; the more stuff gets extracted and discarded, the more linear it is. There's probably no such thing as a perfectly circular economy in which absolutely everything is reused; some things, like food or medicine, are always going to be used up. But the closer you can get to a true circle, the more you improve efficiency, reduce resource use, and limit pollution and waste. Examples of ways to make the economy more circular include:

• Making and buying products built to last, such as a pair of boots that can be resoled, and then keeping them in use longer
• A car-sharing or bike-sharing service that reduces the number of new cars or bikes being produced
• Refilling containers, such as milk bottles or printer ink cartridges, instead of tossing used ones and producing new ones 
• Shopping at thrift stores and yard sales
  
• Giving away unwanted but still usable items on Freecycle
• Upgrading your computer to keep it working longer so you don't need to buy a new one
• Turning old clothes that absolutely can't be worn any longer into rags or putting them in a textile recycling bin
  

Naturally, all this stuff is right up my ecofrugal alley, but I was a bit unclear on how I was supposed to set aside a particular day for it. It seems like you have to do these things whenever they happen to come up: refill your ink cartridges when they run dry, resole your shoes when the old soles wear out, donate your old clothes when you discover they no longer fit, turn socks into rags when the holes in them get too big to repair. The only thing you might be able to schedule on a particular day is a trip to the thrift shop, since you can always hunt for treasures even if there's nothing specific you need at the moment. But surely it would be easier to do that on a weekend than on the Monday of a busy holiday week.

I consulted the Circular Monday website and found that it's primarily a database of businesses that form part of the circular economy in one way or another. The list of U.S. businesses includes Back Market (a seller of refurbished electronics), eBay, Vinted (an online vintage clothing store), Turo (a car sharing marketplace), and Too Good to Go (a marketplace for businesses to dispose of surplus food). So it's really more Circular All Year Round than Circular Monday. However, on Circular Monday itself, most of these businesses have sales and promote them on social media with the #circularmonday hashtag. In this way, they call attention to the concept to help promote circular shopping all year round.

And this, apparently, is what Climate Hero was encouraging me to do next Monday: not necessarily to buy from these businesses right now, but to promote them by posting. "For instance," the email helpfully suggests, "you can inspire by sharing something you chose to buy circularly in the past year instead of new." Then add the appropriate tags for Climate Hero (@climatehero, #climatehero) and Circular Monday (@circularmonday, #circularmonday), and presto, you're part of the event.

Well, I've bought a lot of things secondhand in the past year, but I typically posted about them at the time. So rather than sharing new information, I'll just provide a quick recap of the posts I've done in the past year related to circular shopping:

• Ecofrugal gifting games (December 25)
• The Dress Retro challenge (April 4)
• Why I don't buy everything used (June 5)
• Good hunting at Goodwill (August 20)
• An ecofrugal fashion makeover (September 10)
• Why we're not a zero-waste household (October 8)
  
• Yard-sale haul 2023 (October 15)
• Ecofrugal episodes (November 12)

Here's hoping something on this list can provide a bit of ecofrugal inspiration for you.