This line of product, reduce, is from basebrands and I found them to be particularly creative, nice and helpful regarding these items and their claims of environmentally friendly materials….also quite solution oriented.

The first is called Melaboo (isn’t that clever?) and is made up of 60% bamboo fiber and melamine compounds. This makes it 100% biodegradable……primarily because of the bamboo, but also because the melamine compounds themselves will break down in the environment, it’s just that the bamboo makes it break down faster and in landfills……then there are the colors we can talk about, which is a pretty wide range to choose from. They were particularly careful to choose colors that worked because the bamboo had a tendency to lighten what colors they used, but these still came out fairly saturated to me, and the dyes which came from the melamine are FDA approved.

Next, WaterWeek, the reuseable water bottles created to address the overuse of plastic water bottles use a material called SAN and are BPA free so you have no leaching of the material into the liquid which is what makes them reuseable, over and over. And if any of you out there are House (the irreverant Dr. House) freaks, like I am, you saw the show where the guy was poisoning himself because he was drinking from plastic water bottles and refilling them repeatedly everyday; because of the type of material the plastic water bottles are made of, you can’t do that……..too much bacteria buildup, as well as the toxins from the BPA leaching. ICK! The reduce bottles are dishwasher safe, made to slip over one of the spindles in your dishwasher and you are good to go. These can be purchased in 5 day packs so you can fill one up for each day and take with, and keep refilling. Fill, chill and go!

Hey, it’s a step toward reducing the over 30 million bottles of water that are thrown out everday. In case you haven’t seen it, I did a post on this devastation in landfills per the CondeNast Portfolio story on photog and artist Chris Jordan’s show “Running the Numbers.” If you haven’t seen it, I strongly encourage you to visit…..it’s an interactive slideshow so you’ll have to be a little patient with it, but the rewards are beyond words, literally. Jordan, in this case image number 2, Plastic Bottles, photographed 400 plastic bottles he had in his driveway over and over and over until he reached the 2,000,000 number which are the number of plastic bottles used every five minutes, and that’s just in the U.S.. When you look at his image from far away it’s hard to break down what it is, but use the reset button in the top right hand corner and you can zoom in to see that these are plastic bottles…..a picture is worth a thousand words on this one. It’ll make you want to buy a WaterWeek five pack for each member of the household.

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