A little over a year ago I wrote a post about sustainable alternatives I’d started using in order to produce less waste. Since then, there are some more switches that I’ve made, and I thought I’d write about them, as I’m doing Plastic Free July.

The purpose of Plastic Free July is to ‘refuse single use plastic’, and in planning for this I have realised how challenging it can be, but also how far I’ve come in the last couple of years in being more aware of what I use and what I buy. I’ll be writing a few more posts over this month to update on my progress trying to live plastic free. There are a few hurdles I’m already very aware of, particularly as I’ve planned out the recipes for July for Brexit Baking and there are a few things that I have no idea how I’m going to get plastic free. But we’ll see, who knows what will come up.

In the mean time, here are a few things that I’ve starting using to reduce my waste/plastic use.

Milk

My parents have always (well, as long as I can remember) got glass bottled milk from the milkman, but when I left home I never bothered to get it set up for my own house, until last year. We don’t drink a huge amount of milk but I much prefer supporting our local, Plumb’s Dairy, to buying supermarket milk. Obviously there are days when we run out (mainly due to baking), but this month I’m going to be planning a little more in order to make sure all our milk comes from them.

Deodorant

This is a super recent one. I’d never bothered to look at the ingredients list on my deodorant until Oscar told me a couple of weeks ago that most (anti-perspirant) deodorant has aluminium in it, and I was like, sorry, what? And then I looked at the ingredients list on my deodorant and realised it had propane and butane in it, and I’m not really sure that I want to be spraying flammable gases on myself, so I decided to make my own. Super straightforward, with a little searching around for arrowroot, but I used this recipe, the ingredients weren’t that expensive, and it took me less than 5 minutes to make. So far it seems to work about the same as my old deodorant, so win win basically.



Cotton pads

I realised that I was using a lot of cotton wool for removing make up, and that it was all going to landfill. So I bought some reusable ones, which you can find a ton of variations of on Etsy and other places too. I got a little calico bag with 7 rounds in, and they’ve lasted really well, I’ve had them about a year I think, and they’re showing no signs of wearing out.



Teeth!

After much hesitation I finally switched to a bamboo toothbrush. It’s a little softer than the plastic one I used before, but it still does the same thing, and won’t sit in the ground for thousands of years. I’m planning on using old ones as markers for plants in our garden, where they can happily degrade. We’ve also changed toothpaste for Lush’s toothy tabs, which aren’t plastic free, but, I checked and they’re happy to take the containers to recycle. I asked if they’d consider looking at ways to sell them by weight so you could fill up a container, I guess we’ll have to watch this space as to whether that happens. Still better than toothpaste tubes which are unrecyclable.