We’ve had our first Reduce This email! Lindsey from SwirlyArts/Cuteable wrote:

I buy eco friendly washing powder but it always comes in tiny boxes unlike the bigger brands which come in huge boxes. I don’t want to start buying the ‘normal’ brands of washing powder with less packaging but am concerned that I am buying lots of the smaller boxes.

I know that Ecover do larger boxes of washing powder but I tend to buy the supermarket brand of eco friendly washing powder. The boxes do get recycled but I want to try and reduce the number of boxes I buy.

From my experience, big boxes of Ecover are difficult to find – it’s strange they don’t do refill like the do with liquid cleaning products… They can be ordered online though (I’ve seen places offering 10kg sacks) and depending where you get them from, it might be comparable in cost to supermarket brand products – but of course then you have to think about the delivery footprint…

Anyone got any suggestions or ideas?

(On the subject of washing powders, Ethical Consumer have reviewed a range of laundry detergents on the market in terms of their environmental impact – interesting reading.)

We’ve always tried to minimise the amount of waste our cats produce by buying in bulk where possible, choose recyclable packaging over plastic bags and they mostly eat biscuits, which have less water content so aren’t as heavy/bulky to ship.

Except now one of them is sick – very sick – and is having trouble digesting regular cat food. I’ve become incredibly familiar with cat food ingredients (and also the consistency of cat poop) over the last few months and the better quality stuff (stuff that is made up of at least 50 or 60% the meat/fish it claims to be – most cat food is around 4%) seems to come in small quantities in plastic pouches, or tiny, teeny cans. Enter loads of extra waste.

I try to feed her frozen fish/mince at least once a day – since that has a considerably lower packaging cost – but worry that she’ll miss out on essential vitamins/minerals if I just feed her those all the time. I’m happy to make her food from scratch but don’t have time to do it at every meal time since she’s eating lots of small meals throughout the day. I’ve tried making a chicken & rice mash before but it didn’t really interest her.

Unfortunately for us, this is a short scale problem with this cat (*sniff*) but looking at the ingredient lists on the standard cat food boxes & cans has made me want to do better by the other cats.

So has anyone got any suggestions for how I can reduce the amount of cat food packaging waste we’re producing? Anyone found any decent quality cat food (dry or wet) in large quantities rather than tiny sachets? Any popular homemade cat food recipes?

We feel the same about interior decoration as we do about cleaning: our desire for a clean and well-painted house is marginally outweighed by our desire not to actually clean or paint our house. We’re the type of people that live in half-decorated rooms for months and months on end (our personal best is the living room which took 18months to “finish” – finish in inverted commas because, another 18 months on, we still haven’t sorted out the flooring or painted the radiator yet).

Anyway, in a very unlike us moment, we decided to paint the kitchen last weekend. When we’re done, we washed the emulsion brushes out with water but hit a dilemma with the gloss brushes: is it better to wash them out turps (or some turps substitute as was the actual case) and then pour the resulting painty-turps down the drain or, since they were cheap brushes to start with, just throw them away?

Obviously, throwaway culture is bad – because so much effort went into making the brushes in the first place and then transporting them to us via a DIY emporium – but is pouring a whole bunch of chemicals down the drain any better?

I’m always inclined towards the throwaway option because even after endless time with a tub of turps, I find it so hard to get the brushes re-usable clean again that I end up throwing them away in the end anyway – but THROWAWAY CULTURE, BAAAAAAD! So you see my dilemma.

Since both of those seem pretty bad options, are there any alternatives that we should be considering instead?

(Photo by levi szekeres, c/o sxc.hu)