#plasticfreeproducts

Being an eco-friendly small pet owner 🐭

In April, Tom and I finally got our first pets together - two little mice! Having grown up with hamsters, I was painfully aware of how plastic-heavy small animals are. Their food, treats and bedding are all stored in plastic bags and their cages and toys are often ladened with plastic.

We were desperate to have life other than houseplants to look after, and we had fallen in love with the idea of getting mice. We were also desperate to not break the planet by getting them, however.

So! Here I am to share with you how our eco-friendly mice were brought about. A lot of this can be applied to rats, hamsters and gerbils etc. but bear in mind the specific care points are mouse-centric.

Before going into any details, I just want to disclaim that I was crushing on these mice hard, months before they were even born. I budgeted for them three months ahead and chipped away at buying their things over the course of those three months.

My mentality is to buy secondhand if I can, and if I can't then to buy high quality (and often therefore a bit pricey). This is manageable for me, but only because I'm an organisation gremlin and plan my budgets to the extreme.

🏠Starting with the cage:

This cage is the Ferplast Cage for Hamsters and Mice KARAT 60. The key thing here for me was that it's made of glass and metal, with minimal plastic - only the clips and wheel are made of plastic. Unfortunately for mice, they need a solid wheel which means we couldn't get a metal one. For mice, they need good ventilation as they're prone to respiratory diseases. They also need a deep base to the cage so they can exhibit their natural digging behaviour. The bar spacing of this cage is mice appropriate (0.6 mm or less) as mice are small! They can squeeze between the bars of some hamster cages.

Food bowls! Made of ceramic, one for grains, one for fruit and veg. Shallow enough that they can perch on them (often in them) to nom.

Wooden house and log. Instead of a plastic house, you can get lovely wooden ones that double up as good chewing posts for them as they get older. Plastic isn't the best thing for them to get their teeth onto.

You can't really see it in this photo, but the water bottle I have for them is made of glass instead of plastic. Always check the labels at the shop to make sure anything you're buying is suitable for the critter you're getting!

Edit: It's been brought to my attention that the scale of this cage isn't necessarily obvious from the photo! In terms of gallons, the glass tank is around 12 gallons and the cage area is a further 17 gallons, bringing the total volume of the whole area up to about 29 gallons (these are from my measurements, from the measurements on the product page, it comes out more around 27 gallons. Mine were a bit rough so maybe trust this number more!). For our two mice, this is an appropriate amount of space.

🛏️Now onto bedding:

Mice need materials they can burrow into, but also need a substrate at the very base of the cage to absorb their urine. If you're going a plastic route, this normally involves cat litter at the base and a mix of paper shredding and tissue shredding (if you get sawdust/wood chip, you have to be very careful with what wood it is from, as some trees irritate their respiratory systems)

My plastic-free suggestion depends on you already getting your loo roll and kitchen roll from a plastic-free company (like Bumboo or Who Gives a Crap).

Substrate: As you can see here, the substrate we use is a (slightly mangled from the washing machine) bath mat. It's 100% cotton and every fortnight when we clean them out, we shake it out in the garden and pop it in the washing machine. We have two that we cycle between so the girls never go without. Be careful with what material you buy - 100% cotton is fine, but if it's a blend with a synthetic fibre it should be avoided.

Burrowing materials: Why on earth would you buy paper and tissue pre-shredded in a big plastic bag when you could just...shred paper...and tissue...at home? I got myself a cheap shredder and have one of the technicians at work hoarding scrap paper for me that would otherwise go in the recycling bin, so I'm re-using stuff that would get junked. After its use here, it can then go in our home recycling as our council accepts shredding in mainstream recycling. Whenever we clean the girls out, we add in some loo roll and kitchen roll that we tear up into strips by hand. We never use up all of our loo roll and kitchen roll from each Bumboo order anyway, so it doesn't cost us any more than our standard subscription already. Plus, two mice really don't use up much!

Extra bits: Nutmeg and Honeysuckle are very happy burrowing, running in their wheel and Spidermanning it around the cage bars and the ceiling, but we do provide them with tubes to tunnel through and some DIY structures we've made for them to play with. These are just from our usual waste of loo roll and kitchen roll.

🍴Lastly, on to food:

Now, we love the girls and hope they life a very happy 2-years-life-expectancy, but mouse food from pet stores is honestly a rip-off. Looking at the ingredients and talking to the staff there, there was nothing we couldn't get from our local refill store and farmer's market.

The girls get sunflower seeds, oats and wheat in their grains bowl and a selection of seasonal fruit and veg in their other bowl. Every now and then they get treats of popcorn (plain), different seeds and nuts (not walnuts which are toxic) and even some suet and seed block from what I buy for the garden birds. Nutritionally, this is what they get from the mouse food in the store - the ingredients list is identical to what we give them, the store stuff is just all dehydrated instead.

They are very happy. Almost too much. One of them is weighing in at a whopping 27 g. We're trying our best, moving on...

My point being that it's easy to avoid the plastic if you have a good refill store near you. Ours is priced competitively to the local supermarkets, so this isn't actually an expensive venture at all. But if you're living somewhere like London and have a refill store near you, I know this price comparison is a distant fantasy with a lot of them. On the positive side, the sunflower seed and wheat jars in the photo above haven't been refilled since I filled them first three months ago. They really don't each much! (Apart from Honeysuckle. Twenty-seven grams).

Apart from some balls for them to run around in, and a little carry case for transport, these mice use absolutely zero plastic, a far cry from the plastic-hungry hamster care from my childhood.

In conclusion:

It takes:

planning

budgeting

sourcing of resources

certain habits to already be instilled

but it is possible.

Just because they're little and often seen as the "easy" pets, doesn't mean they shouldn't get just as much love and planning as you would put into getting a cat or dog. Owning any animal is a responsibility one should take seriously and I feel that rodents and fish get overlooked deeply (did you know that a goldfish on average should have a 20 gallon tank?).

Tom and I now manage to do a huge amount of our shopping totally plastic-free. I’ll do other posts on the non-edible side of shopping in the future and have already started with some bathroom and kitchen posts, but today I’m here to talk about ✨ f o o d ✨. This post is going to focus on fresh produce 🥦

Our current situation:

Fresh produce: We live in a town which has a farmers market every Friday and Saturday with loads of different stalls to provide most of our needs. We can therefore find plastic-free fruit and veg 9/10 (some is still cling-wrapped, but if we hit up the different stalls there’s normally one that has a plastic-free option).

To be inclusive, I feel like I should make a note on meat here. I'm veggie and strongly believe that environmentally, everyone needs to chill out on their meat consumption. However, putting my personal views aside, I acknowledge that lots of people are still meat-eaters and I want to give eco-alternatives to them, too. If you are a meat-eater, then try sourcing your meat more responsibly from places such as The Ethical Butcher. As far as the animal agriculture industry can be "good", this is the "good" type of farming.

If we can’t find a plastic-free option? Green beans are an example of something that can be a bit hit-or-miss in the plastic department. Sometimes the stall has them in a big box to grab handfuls of, sometimes they only have them in plastic-wrapped trays. At this point, I personally choose to boycott the plastic version and find different green veg to substitute in if needed. Not always an option depending on what you’re trying to buy and what you need for your diet, but I do it as best I can for non-vital ingredients.

The unavoidables: There are still plenty of things that are plastic-wrapped and that I can't boycott. I eat a lot of peas and cheese as a vegetarian, to get my protein in. Peas are very seasonal, so I get frozen bags from the supermarket which is a plastic that isn’t recyclable, even through Terracycle. Cheese packaging is an issue normally as well, but thanks to a Terracycle drop-off nearby, I can at least recycle the plastic rather than throw it in the general waste.

Our previous situation:

When we lived in London, we didn’t have a farmers market nearby us to get our fruit and veg from. We ended up doing a bit of a combi job between the local greengrocer and the supermarket. There was a lot of plastic in our lives still then, but we could get major fruit and veg without the plastic this way. Some things were unavoidable and we still brought in more plastic than we could have, simply because we were earlier on in our plastic-free journey. We used some hacks to try to minimise the waste though.

Things you can start doing today:

These are hacks that have been spoken about a million times before, but here are some tips on what to do if you have no markets or are unable to access them for whatever reason.

1. Bring your own bags.

2. Buy the fruit and veg that isn’t in plastic whenever possible. Support your local greengrocer if you have one. Find substitutes for the ingredients that you can’t find plastic-free where possible.

3. Buy bigger bags of things you know you’ll use. Getting pasta? Grab the biggest bag they have. You use less plastic buying one 3kg bag than you do buying 6 x 500g bags. This obviously assumes you will be able to transport the bag and also store it at home. Not all supermarkets do large bags of less used staples, but rice, pasta and oats tend to be available in bigger batches.

4. Explore your options. Different supermarkets sell different sized bags of staples. Look around the shops near you.

5. Check the reduced section at the supermarket. These are items that will be going off soon according to their Best Buy dates. They will be disposed of in a huge food waste heap of plastic if they aren’t bought. A lot of things can survive a day or two or more past their Best Buy dates. For foods like meat, freeze whatever you won’t eat on the day you buy it and it should be fine.

6. Boycott what you can. Make substitutes where you can.

7. Buy glass, cardboard, paper or metal over plastic where you can.

8. If you’re veggie or vegan (or just cutting down on meat), avoid the ultra-processed stuff like Quorn etc. It’s not great for your health and it adds plastic. A lot of meat substitutes are soy based, which isn't planet friendly. Force yourself to think about what you’re cooking for yourself and see what alternatives you can do.

9. Frozen veg in plastic bags can be better than fresh veg in some situations. My example of peas from earlier is one. If I was to source fresh peas right now, they would likely be grown abroad with a large footprint behind them. Frozen peas I can buy in big bags and they’re British peas which were grown in the summer and frozen. In the summer, when local peas hit the market, I plan to bulk buy and freeze them myself, but in the meantime, this is the compromise.

10. Say no to the receipt whenever you can. The paper isn’t recyclable.

11. Buy bigger pots of things you know you’ll use before they go off. If you can’t find milk, yoghurts, cream and custard etc. in glass (very rare and often very expensive), then buy the biggest bottle or tub you think you’ll get through. Get one big tub of yoghurt and portion it out into smaller containers at home rather than a 6 pack of snap-pots. Get the big block of cheese.