Three more simple changes?
- Use bar soap (and bar shampoo if you can). The hundreds of soap dispensers your household uses get dumped into landfills forever or as plastics on our beaches and bay, harming sea animals. Bar soap leaves no plastic trash. And only 5% of plastic is ever recycled, a process that has brought new dangers with microplastic invading everything from our oceans to our food and bloodstream.
- Change Laundry soap. The big Tide jugs (even the ones that carry pods) can be switched out to Sheets or similar sustainable laundry products. Ask for “sample” sheets if you can and sample a few to see what works for you. And use grandma’s old trick of ¼ cup of white vinegar in your fabric softener dispenser — works better than fabric softener without the absurdly high chemical pollution. And it’s pennies.
- Stop killing trees for toilet paper. One out of every seven old-growth forest trees is cut for toilet paper. That’s a stunning statistic. Forests are the lungs of the earth, and it’s like we are smoking. Let’s switch to bidets for your toilet (OMG we just got one!) or bamboo-based toilet paper which is renewable (Bamboo grows fast and furiously as those of us who have tried to eliminate it from our yards know). Bamboo toilet paper is sustainable and saves trees. Reel toilet paper, available at Target or online is just one example.
Buy everything in cans and glass bottles, as aluminum and glass are 100% recyclable and always have demand for them. Plastics are made of petroleum, and the oil companies are trying to get us to use more of it to externalize the damages and create their Plan B markets when oil is no longer running our cars. 70% of greenhouse gases are produced by just 100 companies. Just as the Romans thought lead aqueducts were a good idea for convenience, let’s resist the “plastics convenience.”
Because it won’t be convenient for the generations that follow us.
