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Your Plastic Free Home

You may be wondering where to start from when trying to reduce the amount of single-use plastic that you use in your home. Here is a brief list to help you get started on your journey towards a plastic free home.

Reusable swaps

Some of the easiest ways to reduce the amount of plastic that you use is to make a few simple swaps from single-use to reusables. This will greatly impact the amount of plastic you consume:

  1. Buy a reusable water bottle
  2. Use a reusable coffee cup or tea infuser
  3. Buy reusable fabric wraps (beeswax wraps or vegan wraps)
  4. Swap your plastic toothbrush for a bamboo toothbrush
  5. Switch to reusable sanitary products like the Mooncup
  6. Ditch your kitchen sponge and replace with a compostable one or bamboo one.

Swap out your cleaning products

I hate to think of the amount of plastic bottles I used to get through on just cleaning products alone. How many different types of cleaning products have you got in your cupboard?

I’ve got news for you – a couple of simple ingredients makes up a plastic free and eco friendly cleaning product that cleans perfectly, is chemical free and cheap to make up. You can use it on any surface and ditch the multitude of bottles you have in your cupboard.

All you need to do is mix:

1 part white vinegar

1 part vodka

3 parts water

A few drops essential oils of your choice. My favourites are Tea Tree or Lavender.

Can’t be bothered to make up your own cleaning products? Then head to Scoop where we sell Iron & Velvet soluble cleaning pods and Elmkind concentrated cleaning products.

Use Refillable Toiletries

I’m sure if most of you head to your bathroom, most products will be covered in plastic yet they are so easy to swap out if you have a refill shop close by.

At Scoop Wholefoods we sell most of the toiletries you need on tap. Shampoo, Conditioner, Body Wash, Body Lotion, Hand Wash, Hand Lotion, Castile Soap, Facial Toner and more and you can keep on refilling the same bottles over and over again, plus it is also cheaper to do so.

We also have a large range of other products that you can use to make up some of your other essential toiletries, like various clays and pumice to make up facial products, bath salts, carrier oils, essential oils and so much more. We have also made up a few essentials ourselves for you like make-up remover and beard oil.

Shop at Zero Waste Shops

It goes without saying that we are firm believers in reducing the amount of plastic you consume by shopping at zero-waste shops like ours and you can easily save hundreds of thousands of bits of single-use plastic from being sent to landfill.

The notion of purchasing food, that can often only last a few days, in single-use plastic packaging that will take 500 years or more to break down is ludicris. Besides that, each piece of plastic requires fossil fuels to be produced. The climate impact is significantly reduced by purchasing food from shops like ours.

Shop at Farmers Markets

Living in Bath, every Saturday we head to the Green Park Station market to grab lovely plastic free, organic veggies.

It is so much more rewarding to shop directly from local farmers. Their produce is usually seasonal, it hasn’t been flown across the world and it is plastic free.

If you can’t get to a farmers market then try Riverford. They deliver great quality organic veggies to your door. You can even choose to buy their ‘zero-waste’ veggie box and all the items will be plastic free.

Take your containers to butchers, fishmongers, or deli counters

Most places now allow you to take your own containers in with you and have them be filled up with the products you want. Try it out next time you need to go to any of the above places!

The low quality plastic used to wrap these products can never be recycled and neither can the styrofoam trays they come in. This swap will make a great difference.

Parents: switch to reusables too

One of the scariest realisations when I first became a parent was the sheer amount of nappies a baby gets through every single day. Swapping to reusable nappies cuts down on so many nappies that go straight to landfill and again take hundreds of years to breakdown.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that they weren’t nearly as daunting as I thought they would be. We use biodegradable, disposable liners, which makes washing them so much easier.

We also use reusable wipes instead of disposable ones. Just dampen them a little before using them. I have a spray bottle with water and a couple of drops of lavender essential oil on my changing table and give them a little spray before using them.

I hope that these tips help you make some changes towards living a more plastic free life. Don’t forget, every little change helps. We don’t need a few people living a perfectly zero waste lifestyle, but rather lots of people doing it imperfectly.

Check out some of our other articles on zero-waste shopping and recycling.

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