Going Zero Waste
November 29, 2020•536 words
In my house we use tons of plastic. Not on purpose, but it has just been a fact of our lives until recently. We tried the recycling route once but when we saw our trash company dump our recycling contents into the regular trash truck we gave up.
Now however, we have been slowly but surely going towards zero waste products as much as we can. So far, we have made the switch to three items in our house that we use quite a bit of. The first one we switched was our toothpaste!
According to the Bite website, over one billion plastic toothpaste tubes are thrown away every year. That number is insane and that is just toothpaste tubes. How many other products in plastic packaging are thrown away every year? Needless to say, we wanted to lower our plastic usage and this was our first step. We love Bite! It’s so easy to use and it tastes and feels great. My teeth feel super clean after using Bite. It also feels like it eliminates bad breath better then my toothpaste that is in a tube.
Our next zero waste switch over was Blueland. This company creates great household cleaning products like glass cleaner, bathroom cleaner, all-purpose cleaner, dish soap, hand soap, laundry and dish detergent. Blueland sends you reusable glass bottles and tins to dissolve or store your tablets in. The tablets are the awesome part, you fill up one of your cleaner bottles full of warm water and dissolve the cleaner tablet in it. It’s awesome! This also lowers the carbon footprint of shipping because they aren’t shipping heavy packaging because they have eliminated the water weight. One thing I will say though, I would say to skip the detergents because they don’t work all that well.
Our latest move is to Ethique branded shampoo bars and soaps. These again reduce the carbon footprint by reducing the volume of water that is being shipped. I was somewhat skeptical at first on how clean these products would make me feel but, I am happy to say they work awesome! My wife has oily hair so I purchased her a shampoo bar for oily hair and she loves it. One other perk is these items are in compostable boxes. It’s crazy! The sticker that keeps them sealed is compostable as well. I love the idea of something that breaks down into nothing over time.
I’m not 100% sure how true this is but I read that plastic never ever goes away. It breaks down but it breaks down into small particles which are then ingested by our food sources like fish. This means eventually, we end up eating our plastic waste as well. Even recycling isn’t good enough because plastic degrades as it is recycled. Eventually we can’t use it anymore and it ends up as waste anyway.
I just wanted to share some things that my family is doing to reduce our waste footprint. It’s actually quite fun researching this stuff and finding all of these new products to try. The bonus is the fact that our plastic usage is going down little by little and that makes me feel good!