Welcome back to my biweekly series documenting changes I’m making in my life to lower my ecological footprint. So far I’ve written about making changes within my kitchen as well as my effort to buy items secondhand instead of brand new. This weeks post is going to be about my effort to lower my consumption of single use items.
Along with my last two blog posts this is something that I’ve begun to implement, but still have many changes to make. I will discuss both actions I’ve been taken as well as actions I plan to take. There are three primary areas where I see single use items – particularly plastics – most utilized in my life.
- Cleaning supplies
The amount of cleaning supplies that we own is incredibly unnecessary. About half of them we inherited from the previous homeowner, but we contributed to our massive collection as well. There are so few cleaning supplies that are really necessary. If we were starting from nothing we would ideally only have 5 or 6 items as seen in the pictures. With our current surplus, we will continue using the ones we have until they are gone, and then I’ll see how I can repurpose the old containers.
The cleaning supply that we most often use is our all-purpose cleaner. We keep it in the glass spray bottle and refill it using a concentrate from a company called Grove. Grove has many great sustainable options for cleaning supplies, beauty supplies etc. There are also other companys that offer concentrated cleaning solutions, which is a great alternative to buying a new plastic bottle of cleaner with each refill (that is mostly water anyway).
Another thing to mention here is that our use of paper towels has plummeted. We have reusable towels that we toss in the laundry when they’re dirty and we barely touch the roll of paper towels anymore. In the beginning it was tricky to break this habit but hiding the roll deep under the sink helped us with an out of sight out of mind mentality.
- Beauty supplies
The second area of my life where I am currently utilizing single use plastics is in our bathroom. Each time I toss a plastic shampoo bottle in the recycling I wonder about the likelihood of it actually being recycled. The best thing we can do is to not use this plastic to begin with. An alternative that I look forward to trying is shampoo bars.
When I collected our shower/beauty products to take the photo below it struck me to imagine these bottles sitting in a landfill for longer than I will be alive…
- Food
Food is something that I talked about a lot in the first post of this series, but it fits into this topic really well too. Walking around certain grocery stores I can’t help but notice the abundance of plastic packaging on so much of their produce.
In that first post I wrote about the importance of buying local and in season. I’ve found that when I do that I oftentimes end up with food that isn’t so heavily packaged. I’ve also found that it really matters where you shop. Some stores have every single item packaged in plastic, whereas others have almost none.
Overall, our society uses a LOT of single use plastics. Part of this problem is that we’re convinced that we need things we don’t. We don’t need 29 different cleaning products, bar soap oftentimes will do just as good as liquid soap, and not everything needs to be individually packaged in plastic wrap. What other products can you convert to get away from single use plastics? I would love to hear of suggestions in the comments!