Sunday, August 10, 2008

One happy travel tea mug.

plastic is forever
As Kerry let on the other day (in her post on August 7th) I knit my travel tea mug a koozie for the sake of saving plastic. It was either that or buy a new mug and buying a new travel mug would definitely involve buying some plastic and wasting the plastic part of the mug I already have. Some travel mugs are ALL plastic (very bad for many reasons). Particularly bad because most of the hard plastic mugs are made from plastic with chemicals that leach out when exposed to heat-ick! Other mugs, like mine, are made of metal (on the outside and inside with insulation between these two layers of metal) and a plastic top for sipping (after all sipping from a metal top would burn you). Well, my metal mug is getting old (3+ years) and the rubber bottom came off exposing a little hole where the insulation was shot in...and with repeated washings over the last year all the insulation came out of that now exposed hole-opps. Now what I have is a HOT metal mug which burns my hand when I put hot tea in it because there is no insulation left to protect me. So, what to do, what to do? Buy a new mug or burn myself everyday or give up tea or give up leaving my house before drinking my tea in a regular mug? No, none of the above. I knit my mug a nice little sleeve and now both the mug and I are happy as can be. I especially am happy because I didn't have to purchase anything new made of plastic or waste anything I already had that has a plastic component! The mug is particularly happy because I picked a nice periwinkle color to complement it's pink exterior. Being on the plastic diet after all does reacquire creativity sometimes :)

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