One green bottle…

One green bottle, hanging on the wall, one green bottle, hanging on the wall, and if one green bottle should accidently fall, it will bounce softly because I got a soft padded zip up jacket to go with it – woah me.

Ok, so I bought the girls new drink bottles for school this term. We have literally thousands of the things (ok, about eight). But I’ve just bought them new ones because last term I put Molly’s in the freezer (with the LID OFF I might add) and it split. Jagged metal splits right down through the puppy’s face. Ooops. I got to peel it back like a metal orange and crow-bar the cylinder of ice out of it with a fork. I do live a dangerous life.

The horror was etched into her face for about 10 seconds before curiousity at the inside view wormed its way in. But in memory of that horror I promised to buy a new bottle for her for year 3.

The trouble with drink bottles is that they taste pretty bleah. I know this because I find myself drinking from them when I’ve delivered them to drama straight from school and I end up sitting in the waiting room parched and desperate enough to drink from one of them. I unscrew the top rather than use their popup whatsit (I am the one who washes it, so it’s probably best left out of the loop). And they just taste bleah. If they are plastic, then they have that peculiar and fully disgusting plastic aftertaste that manages to make fresh water seem stale. And if they are aluminium I have visions of myself dying of aluminum poisoning the way a hamster of mine did. That was brutal.

So someone suggested one green bottle, which advertises itself as BPA free water bottles, and we had a look. Not bad – and they happened to be having a sale! Whoop. I ended up buying one for each of them despite the 7 remaining ones lurking in the cupboard. I also bought the insulating jackets. Not so much to keep the water cool, but to cushion the blow when they get dropped on the playground asphalt 6 times a day. The order came with a spare sports lid, the gesture of which impressed me no end.

I should have bought one for me too though. I have a habit of buying Evian once every 3 months and then using that bottle to refill and reuse for aerobics classes, beside the bed, in the car, down the allotment and anywhere else that a refreshing splash is appreciated. I think Evian have got wind of my duplicity. They’ve deliberately started manufacturing their lid hinges to break after 3 days. I could switch to franklin spa, but I prefer the style with the little hingy lids to the sports pull up kind, because when I want water, I want it HARD and FAST. Please calm down sir.

So I pop back to the onegreenbottle website (where I notice that it DOES say free cap with every order, but I like the way it made me feel to get that without knowing it was going to happen. I feel speeeeshal.) And there is a NEW product. The “waterdog“. The description alone has me slack jawed with awe. “It enables rapid hydration through its unique sports cap“. RAPID. I now NEED this.

The problem is – it looks like a fire extinquisher in blue. It almost looks as if RAPID might be just a bit TOO much. I’d really hate to fire it up and squirt my eyeball right out of the socket via the nasal cavity. The mess on the floor in Studio E would be a bit much and I suspect that they might suspend my membership.

I think I might take the plunge anyway, and I’ll just close my eyes really tight when I drink.

When they sent out the two we’ve already ordered, their leaflet came with some recycling advice. It also came with a smoothie recipe, but I want to avoid drinking anything that includes an avacado in it and is intended to be liquid. Most of the recycling tips were things that we do anyway. (Since I am apparently a recycling nazi according to Mr Boxer Shorts, but if he puts paper in the plastic bin just one more time I am going to recycle his ASS. Yeah, so there.)

One of the tips – ditch disposables: wash and reuse cleaning clothes, hankies, nappies gave me pause. I would have said that it is something we already do. Well, not the nappies anymore. (Anyone in the market for a large collection of fitted cloth nappies and the various accoutrements that go with them??) And we’d sort of stopped using hankies in preference to balsam covered tissues that are kind to your nose – and if you catch, kill, bin a cotton hankie I have to go rooting through the garbage while swearing a lot.

But the first one – cleaning cloths I would have just nodded and said yep. I have a cycle of chux that I use and wash all the time. (I think that’s an Australian brand name, so if you don’t know what a chux is, think of those thin kitchen clothes that come in blue and white or pink and white stripes. They have NOTHING whatsoever to do with incontinence!) But recently I saw an alternative that I really like and want to try. They are knitted cleaning clothes made by a person I know who sells her knitted stuff on etsy. The cleaning cloths just look so CUTE! She knits them in really good colour combinations. I could use them exactly the same way as my chux. My question is – will they last longer than the chux? And will they start to smell iffy when Mr Boxer Shorts uses them and then fails to wring them out and leaves them in a heap leaking milk and cornflake slime? And could I hang a row up in front of the window to dry and it look really funky rather than like a nasty collection of wrongness?

These things need to be found out I think.

I am now off to buy a fire extinquisher, a knitted cloth, then make the avocado smoothie and see if it really IS as disgusting as it sounds.

Categories: environmental stuff

7 Comments

  • Jen says:

    I think even the BPA free bottle have a funky taste to them. I too used to re-use my Evian bottle for ages until I started to worry about all that plastic leeching out. Thoughts of cancer took over and I settled on the funky tasting bottles. Plus, Evian is just too damn expensive these days.

  • alison says:

    Until now I’ve only really been antsy about plastic in the microwave (I won’t put it in). but now I am starting to be much aware of how much we use in terms of containers and bottles.

  • Tracy says:

    Remember when we used to just drink water from fountains and didn’t know it was a problem?
    I’m as bad as anyone else now. I’m delighted that we have a water filtration system we put into our home. We’ve tried several approaches to taking water with us when out and have yet to come up with a winner.

  • alison says:

    When I was a kid, the best water came from the tap over the bath. The kitchen water was bleah, but I’d drink directly from the bath tap any time.
    For a while as a grown up I used a filter jug here in London, but now I just serve up tap water to the whole family. In winter it’s as good as chilled.
    We only buy bottled water when we’re out and I’ve forgotten to refill a bottle to take with us.
    The new “waterdog” should turn up tomorrow! I ordered two, one for me and one for Mr Boxer Shorts as its his birthday (today).

  • Marcha says:

    I have knitted cotton chux. They’re fabulous. They last longer than cut-up pieces of old towel, and they work as well as microfiber, and are easier to clean than microfiber. Good cotton will also not give off lint, so they can be used for windows and other surfaces on which you don’t want streaks and fluff.

  • alison says:

    Well, I’ve ordered them, so as soon as they arrive I’ll be testing them out in style! Using them for cleaning the mirror in the bathroom sounds like a good idea too.

  • It is good in a way that there are more alternatives these days for us to choose for our kids that what our parents had to choose from when we were kids. It must have been pretty difficult for them in a way, but in some other ways, the lack of choice would have made life simpler. We run a web directory for environmental issues called the website of Climatarians that addresses many of these issues.