Byrd's Filling Station Refillers

Introduced my daughter to the refill store yesterday. She has been wanting to eliminate her shampoo and conditioner bottles for a while, so she purchased small bars of each of those products to try.  Hopefully, she will be a return customer!

This week, we are traveling - flying to visit family for a large celebration of our matriarch's 90th birthday. We have shopped at the refill store to get snacks for the plane so that we don't have to eat the plastic-laden snacks in the airport. Water bottles will be emptied and refilled inside security, so that we don't need any of the plastic...

Restaurant win last night!  We went to The Tavern at Waterdog, and they served paper straws for my kids' drinks. Then, when we didn't finish everything that we had ordered, I put the leftovers in our tiffin to bring home. With 3 tiers, we were able to bring home half a burger, fries, and leftover broccolini and cook them for lunch today! 

One of my favorite things to do on the road is to seek out small, independent cafes. But for the past 2+ yrs, I rarely found one that would fill my own travel mug, even once it was determined that the virus is not spread in that way.  Even worse, many places had switched to using disposables only.  I tried to avoid the plastic lid by enjoying...

Another nice week on the coast. Picked up another 3.5-4 pounds of trash on my walk.  Unfortunately, I had to leave behind a large, heavy box of empty beer bottles, as well as two smelly, leaky, full doggy poop bags (deposited everything far from the ocean).  Over many months I've picked up at least 20 not-leaky, full doggy poop bags and...

Glad that we have a new zero-waste store in town to help with food packaging for sure :) all of our smoothie add-ins (hemp seeds, flax, chia, and dates) are available there. Now if more food packaging was actually recyclable, that would be great. So many kid-oriented and/or crunchy snacks have that multi-layer film that is terrible.

I was happy to see that I use less plastic per year than the average American, but I know I can do so much more! I will start by bringing my own containers to restaurants for left overs, and get better at reusing my own water bottles vs drinking the plastic ones at work.

Leading by example, and showing locations of refill stations either at a storefront or online.

I never looked at the ingredients in gum. I was only ever concerned about the amount of sugar and always looked for "sugar free". I now will look at the ingredient list. Of course I want plastics out of my gum! I can't believe this is even something I have to think about!

It makes it harder to shop at my local grocery store while also trying to save money. My neighborhood store is Nob Hill, and the item with the lowest price point per count, oz, lb, etc, is usually packaged in plastic. It makes me having to chose between my wallet or my environment!