Plastic Plastic Everywhere

If you've been paying attention, you know that Ben and I (along with a few fellow MCCers) are trying to go plastic-less for the month of June. Never did we imagine how difficult this would be. Even when we're being conscientious, plastic seems to be unavoidably pervasive in our lives.

Take, for example, the bleach and laundry detergent I purchased yesterday. It took Ben several "um, are you sure you want to buy that?"'s for me to notice that the bleach bottle and detergent bag were both plastic, by which time, I had already purchased them. My defense: we CAN'T not do laundry for an entire month.

Nor can we go without drinking water. When we got our 5-gallon Culligan bottles (plastic, but refillable!) filled last week, we realized that they get resealed with a new plastic lid.

Our only other oopsies so far: 2 plastic bags. To avoid the plastic packaging on cheese, we bought some at the deli counter and asked that it be wrapped in paper instead of plastic. Before we could stop him, the deli-counter-man then put our paper-wrapped cheese into a plastic bag and slapped a price sticker on it. Nooooo! The 2nd bag was entirely, though inadvertently, my fault.

There's a plastics-related question (read: mounting concern) eating away at me. Even in non plastic-less months, we ignore funny looks at the check-out counter and take cloth bags or the traditional Haitian djakout (basket) with us for groceries. Of course, we still sometimes end up with plastic grocery bags and these become our garbage bags. A whole month of NO plastic bags means NO garbage bags.... With my second to last garbage bag already full, I'm wondering how we should dispose of the non-food (we compost) and non-plastic waste that we generate this month? Any ideas?