Hey guys! So, I've done a blog like this before where I talked about all of the zero waste swaps I've made so far, but I think it's time to do another one. When I made the last one I was living with my parents and my younger brother and it was difficult to make swaps when I didn't have my own kitchen, bathroom and laundry room. I'm going to include the swaps I've made previously because I still think they deserve a mention, and I'm sectioning the swaps into rooms or activities just to make sure I don't forget anything. Depending on how long this post gets, I might split it up into I couple posts.
Kitchen
This room had the most to swap, and it was easy because I didn't have any of this stuff anyway. So I had to buy something regardless and I chose the more sustainable options. If I already had something that would have worked for the purpose I needed it to, then I wouldn't have bought anything because the most sustainable thing to do is use what you already have.
Paper Towels- There is nothing good about paper towels. I could literally write an entire blog about how much they suck. First of all they're made from wood and it takes 17 trees (and 20,000 gallons of water) to make one ton of paper towel. Almost 51,000 trees are cut down every day just for America's paper towel habit. Then they process, and bleach, and process some more, until they become these giant "parent rolls" which are so huge and so heavy only heavy duty equipment can move them. So that either uses electricity or fuel, depending on the paper mill. Then they get individually wrapped in plastic, stuck in a box (more trees), the boxes are stacked on a pallet, and then the whole pallet is wrapped in plastic to keep it together. Finally, when the paper towel is purchased by the consumer, it get used for a moment and then thrown away. Paper towels are considered "contaminated" when used so they cannot be recycled, and they are so processed with chemicals that they can't be composted, so, to the landfill they go. 3,000 tons of paper towel waste goes to the landfill just in America. If we want to include the rest of the world, then it becomes 254 million tons. Paper towels are biodegradable, but it's so hard for things to break down in the landfill because there is no oxygen. Therefore, the landfill creates CO2 and CH4 (Methane). Methane is 84x more potent than CO2. These greenhouse gasses contribute to global warming which is a huge issue in todays world. So yeah, maybe we can agree to stop using paper towels? This swap was easy because I already had towels. I ended up buying some white ones for cleaning specifically, but they were cheap and I use them all the time. There are also 'unpaper towels' that you can get if you don't want to use your dishcloths. You can make your own and there are a million tutorials for that, or you can get them on Etsy, EarthHero. We also 'switched' to cloth napkins which again I already had. Those you can also find online through the same sites, or even in some stores like Target or Bed Bath and Beyond.
Dish Sponges/Scrubbies - Most
sponges are made of things like polyester (a synthetic fiber and a petroleum product), polyurethane (plastic polymers), cellulose (natural fiber) and then chemicals and dyes. These sponges will release tiny pieces of plastic (microplastics) with every use and these pieces are so small that they can't really be filtered out. According to
researchers, the recommended time you should use a single sponge for is one week. So if people follow that guideline, then that's 52 sponges per year per household entering the landfill. These also cannot be recycled or composted. We swapped to a walnut sponge that can be composted and we found it at our local Food Co-op; they are totally affordable. We have a dish scrubby too, also from the Co-op, also super affordable, also made of natural materials. You can find these things at Target, Zero waste shops, Etsy, and a ton of other places. Copper scours, linen dish rags, reusable cotton sponges, plant based loofah sponges, or different kinds of natural brushes are also available. I didn't include a picture of my sponge because it's getting close to retirement, but here we have our dish scrubby and our veggie scrubby (The plastic one, not ideal material, but it works and, when it comes to the end of it's life, we will get one made of more sustainable material).
Plastic bags - This can mean grocery bags, produce bags, garbage bags, snack bags, sandwich bags, freezer bags, poop bags, any kind of plastic bag. These should not even exist. They are so unnecessary and wasteful.
Eight states have already banned plastic bags. However, it's just the plastic bags that you get while checking out at the store, not the other ones previously mentioned. Don't get me wrong, I think this is great, but it's not enough. The problem with plastic is that it's made from fossil fuels which has negative effects on both human life and the planet, and it's not a sustainable source at all. Plastic never completely breaks down, which leads us back microplastics which kill or harm other species, often marine or avian life, and they end up in the food we eat. There are so many options to use instead of plastic bags that it just doesn't make any sense to me why we use them. We have paper bags (not the best option because paper comes from trees), cloth bags, Tupperware, Pyrex dishes, stasher bags, reusable produce bags, cotton bulk bags, hemp bulk bags, glass jars, I could keep going.
This is my one and only stasher bag, I would love to get more eventually because I use it a lot. These are made of silicone, they are very durable, and they don't stain or hold scents very much. I definitely recommend these. You can get them from the
Stasher bag website, or Earthhero. I think target has them as well. These do get a little pricier and there are knockoff brands, but from what I've heard they really aren't as good. I don't mind paying a little extra for good quality.
I am a glass jar whore. I save so many jars and they collect quickly because we tend to only buy things packaged in glass. We do use them, they don't just sit there. We store our bulk items in them, we store things in the fridge like carrots, celery, cilantro, mushrooms, and so on, in them. We also use them when we make homemade dressings or juices. I'm currently using an old Veganaise jar for a water cup, because we don't actually have drinking glasses.
This is our bread bag, which we haven't had a chance to use it yet because of COVID regulations, but I'm excited to use eventually.
We have a LOT of reusable shopping bags. However, sometimes we do forget them. In that case we try to do without bags and fight through the struggle of not having enough arms, or if we really can't carry all of it them we will fit as much as we can into as little paper bags as possible. We should just keep some in each car, and once I'm done with this post I think I will go put them in there.
These are the glass jars with our bulk items. Some of those jars were pickle jars, peanut butter jars, olive jars; there's a little bit of everything. This is such an easy thing to do because you're buying the jars anyway. You might as well give them another life!
Then we have our poop bags, which are compostable. We get ours from
Mudbay, which I believe is just a west coast store, but there are other options. Before we got this one we got some online from
Lucky Dog and those were made out of corn products. You don't have to worry about them ripping, leaking, composting too quickly, none of that. Both of them work really well.
As far as garbage bags go... it really depends on where you live and how your garbage disposal company works. You might be able to go bag less and you might not. We haven't set up garbage at our new place yet because we haven't needed to. Right now we use bags and take our garbage to a different place. We are also producing significantly less trash now than we have in the past, so we have a smaller garbage can that doesn't fill up very fast. Once we get our garbage set up here I'll look into it more.
Cling wrap/saran wrap - These are the same thing as plastic bags: An unnecessary use of resources and unnecessary waste. We swapped to Beeswax wrap, which works better in my opinion, and it isn't a pain in the ass to work with. Beeswax wrap isn't vegan, but there are vegan alternatives as well. Mine were a gift and I didn't think about it when I asked for them, but I use them all the time and I'm not going to get rid of them just because they aren't vegan, because that's wasteful.
We just got the waxed Cotton bags from Jer's parents. I was reading the package, though, and I believe those ones are vegan, which I love. I'm pretty excited to use them. Also, those are from Trader Joe's.
Straws - I don't feel like I need to go into detail here because of how much reusable straws blew up not that long ago (we all saw the
turtle video, I'm sure). Don't use plastic straws. There are metal, glass, paper, hemp, bamboo and silicone straws, or you can do shit the old fashioned way and just drink it right out of the cup. I really like to use straws though. There are so many options and they are really affordable. You can get these from Target, Earthhero, Etsy, and Bed Bath and Beyond. You can even get these at your local drugstore.
I prefer the metal ones.
Coffee filters/ Coffee pot - In my last blog, I mentioned that the coffee pot we had in the kitchen had since been retired. It was really unnecessary for just me to make a pot of coffee, or even half a pot. I don't drink enough coffee to use it all, so I was wasting water, coffee, and energy by running this coffee pot everyday. When Jer's parent's were coming to visit, we assumed they wanted their coffee pot while they were here, so we figured that was a good time to swap to a more sustainable option.
I actually love this little coffee drip thingy, I don't know why, but making my cup of coffee with it is weirdly therapeutic. I am trying to wean myself off of it because coffee really isn't the best thing for you or for the environment. Most coffee comes from South America, primarily Brazil, and transporting it to all over the world creates a rather large carbon footprint. I also don't love the fact that I'm so addicted to it that I get withdrawals when I don't have it. I got this coffee drip thing from
Target. It's made of wood and glass, so there is no plastic. It's perfect. The coffee filters were a gift so I'm not sure where those are from, but if you just google 'reusable coffee filters' you'll find some, and they're pretty inexpensive.
The last kitchen thing is our compost bucket. We have our worm bin, but there are some things that we can't put in there, and also we have a lot of food scraps which we are working on cutting down, but right now it's too much to give to our worms. So we have this compost bucket to store the scraps in until the bucket is full, and we take it down and empty it into our neighbor's compost bin that she lets us use. She's so cute. I won't go into the details abut why we compost, it's pretty much the same gist as what I said about the paper towels. I am going to do a blog about our worm bin in the future and I can go into more detail then.
This is it, we got ours from our local food co-op. You can get these from a few places though.
Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, and
EarthHero all have them. I think all of them are the same kind of thing where there is a carbon filter in the lid that traps smells and keeps bugs away and all that fun stuff. It works pretty well and I've never smelled anything funky coming out of it. In the background of the picture you can see our bamboo cutting board (our only cutting board) and bamboo drying rack. We got both from Bed Bath and Beyond, and I really don't know much about that company as a whole so I can't say whether they are decent or not. However we moved out pretty suddenly and we needed some things fasted than we could find them secondhand, so it was handy to just go there.
That's it for the kitchen swaps. I think I'll split it up here, and then next week I'll have the other half of the swap for you. That'll be all of the bathroom things, cleaning, and all the other little odds and ends. Hopefully you got some ideas from this about how you can decrease your household waste. The average person disposes of 1600lbs of trash each year. That's so much! Who wants to be average, let's be better than average together. Let's try to cut that down.
Thanks for reading!
Courtney.
