Disposable razors rose to popularity in the second half of the 20th century because they're just so convenient. Once the razor starts to go dull, all you have to do is buy another razor and throw the old one away without having to worry about maintaining the blades and the hassle of replacing the individual blades. Plus, safety razors are way more prone to cuts that the easy swivel head of disposable razors.
Well, safety razors are no longer the standard for low-waste shaving. A rechargeable electric razor or epilator are really great and can last a long time. Epilators can even extend the length of time in-between shaving. There are also new types of non-electric razors that aren’t safety razors, such as the Leaf razor that behaves as a hybrid swivel head razor and safety razor, where you just have to recycle the blades after they're done—and it's made 100% out of metal, which is more sustainable than plastic. No more throwing away a couple of razors every single month!
While of course you don’t really want to buy a mattress, couch, or really any piece of furniture covered in fabric without thoroughly examining it first (unless you plan to totally do a DIY makeover on it), buying used furniture is a great eco-friendly swap to buying furniture from Target or IKEA.
Used furniture could be really expensive if you want to go the vintage or antique route, but it could also save you a ton of money if you instead go to estate or yard sales or buy from Facebook Marketplace. If you're willing to wait or dig a little to find the perfect piece, getting your furniture this way will save you money and help create less waste for the planet.
Back in the ‘50s, there really weren’t that many liquid soaps to choose from. Most soaps were either bars or powders. And with the rise in popularity of liquid soaps also came the rise of how much water waste companies produced in order to make their soaps. They also came in plastic bottles that will likely never decompose, rather than cardboard boxes that could eventually decompose.
So an easy swap to make in your home would be to buy bar or powder soap replacements for your favorite products. The bar or powder options are usually less expensive too! For example, if you love using a Dove liquid body wash, instead buy the bar soap version. There are also several options for shampoo and conditioner bars—even lotion bars! And for your dishes and laundry, powders can work just as well as liquid detergent.
Ever since there was a toilet paper shortage at the beginning of the pandemic, bidets have been rising in popularity in the United States like never before. When you think of bidets, you probably remember them as “that weird thing that was in my bathroom at the hotel in Europe." However, now they're making their way to the U.S. in the form of detachable toilet seat bidets.
These bidets are easy to install on your normal toilet, and you use them instead of using a ton of toilet paper when you go * number two * . You still use some toilet paper to dry yourself off, but it still helps you lower the amount of paper waste you create every day. If you really want to get into zero-waste bathrooming, some brands offer special towels you can use to dry off and then immediately wash. It’s kind of like cloth diapering for adults, but a little less gross.
If you're looking to cut down on paper waste, go for these! Unpaper towels are essentially cloths that hook together and roll up like a paper towel roll after you have used and washed them. This makes it easier to use towels instead of paper to clean up messes around the house.
Now of course you don’t have to get the marketed “unpaper towels,” and you could just buy a pack of microfiber towels to use them the same way. However, we would recommend keeping a roll of paper towels handy for cleaning the toilet or when your dog has an accident in the house—because you don’t want to spread bacteria through your house. Just keep the microfiber or “unpaper” towels out for the everyday spills and cleanups and leave the paper towels for the messes that could be really gross to limit your use of paper towels.
If you love to use plastic wrap, then beeswax wrap is a logical eco-friendly alternative. You can find different sizes on Amazon, or you could even make it yourself. It's a piece of fabric that has a layer of beeswax coating on each side of the fabric so that it becomes easily moldable with the heat of your hands and holds its shape.
This is helpful to seal off the other half of your avocado, cover the bowl you lost the lid for, or even create a little pouch for your snack. To wash them, you just put some soap and water on them, then let them air dry. To make them, you just have to buy some fabric and beeswax, heat the beeswax to make it a liquid, coat the fabric on both sides, then let it cool.
While it's great to reuse plastic tupperware or random reusable to-go boxes from Chinese food takeout, if you're wanting to buy a nice matching set of storage containers for leftovers or to take snacks out on a hike or in your bag for the kids, go with glass or stainless steel.
Not only will glass and stainless steel last longer because they won’t get stained with tomato sauce or smell like garlic for way too long, but they're also natural materials that can nearly infinitely be reused or recycled—unlike plastic. They're also healthier for you because even though a plastic container says it’s BPA free, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t made with other chemicals that we don’t yet know how they affect the body.
Soaps you can buy refills for, like hand soap or dish soap, are more eco-friendly than just buying the whole soap again and again because the packaging that the refills come in often use fewer resources to create, offer more product, and could more easily be recycled. An even better alternative to this would be to just buy a nice soap pump and then buy refills from the store to fill this up—especially if it's glass or stainless steel.
Not only does this prevent the waste created by the complicated plastic soap pump, but it usually looks better too. However, the best alternative to this would be to buy from a company that lets you send back the bottle once you're done with it and buy a new one, then they refill that bottle and send it to someone else who buys it next. A great example of this is Plaine Products. This cyclical system is highly effective in preventing waste.
Once you try dryer balls, you won’t go back to using normal dryer sheets ever again. These should be way more popular than they already are, not only because they're more eco-friendly, but also because they help your clothes dry faster. Plus, you can customize the scent with your favorite essential oils or leave them fragrance-free.
Dryer balls are balled-up sheep wool that help prevent static in your clothes, similar to a dryer sheet, and they can also help your clothes dry faster because wool is moisture-wicking. To add scent to your drying clothes, you can simply add a few drops of your favorite essential oils to each ball to freshen up your clothes!
Starbucks and several other coffee shops have reusable coffee cups you can purchase to be refilled every time you order your morning coffee instead of using a new, single-use cup every day. There are even some coffee shops that will let you bring in your own coffee cup to be filled instead of using a to-go cup.
Of course, not every coffee shop will do this, so it’s best to ask beforehand. However, if you want to save a lot of money and be more sustainable with your coffee purchases, you could even just make your coffee at home or at work with a normal mug. Weird, right? You might have to wake up a little earlier, but your wallet and the earth will thank you.
Speaking of packaging that isn't very easily recyclable or reusable: deodorant. The packaging deodorant comes in has several moving parts, and the plastic it's made out of is often not accepted at your local recycling center. And remember, just because the packaging says it's recyclable does not mean that your local recycling center would be able to process it.
There are a couple of alternatives to the classic deodorant container. One that offers the most similar experience without all the plastic is to get deodorant packaged in cardboard instead. Native deodorant offers this alternative, and you can find both versions at Target. Another thing that some major deodorant brands like Dove, Secret, and Old Spice are doing is creating reusable packaging with available refills. These make it super easy to get your favorite deodorant in a more sustainable packaging.
Toothbrushes are another plastic item that we just throw away when we're done with it. However, plastic does not fully biodegrade until thousands of years later, so all of the plastic we're creating in our societies won’t go away—and if it's not repurposed or recycled, which is still not good enough, it will just pile up for years and years and we will have to live with plastic all around us, which has been shown to be harmful not only to our health, but the planet’s and animals’ health.
Choosing to use natural materials where possible is much better for ours and the planet’s health. Metal can almost infinitely be broken down and formed into different uses, while natural materials like wood and natural fibers break down in only a few years—not thousands. So choosing to use bamboo toothbrushes instead of plastic ones is a great swap to lower the waste produced in our lifetime.
When we were little, getting hand-me-downs was probably the worst thing ever. We didn’t want to wear the same thing our sibling or cousin or that kid down the street wore. But oh, how the tables have turned. Secondhand shopping is now a big trend—and a great way to create a circular economy and fight fast fashion.
While there are several issues around the gentrification of thrifting going around right now, the pros just about outweigh the cons. Yes, used clothes are rising in price because of the rising demand, but it's also helping many people who would normally only shop at Target or Old Navy get similar clothes for cheaper, and without buying anything that took new resources to create. It’s a great way to start shopping, especially with all the online options popping up.
Why do so many of us still use plastic, single-use water bottles? Sure, they might be convenient, but it really isn’t much more convenient than simply carrying a reusable water bottle around and filling it up in a sink or water fountain. If you prefer filtered water, invest in a nice filter at home and fill a large water bottle up to take with you and drink from throughout the day.
This creates so much less waste, and it might even be more convenient because you can always have it with you and can fill it up practically anywhere for free, whereas with the single-use bottles you would have to buy them over and over again. And of course, the most sustainable reusable water bottle would be made of glass or stainless steel, but even plastic reusable bottles work great too.
If you use cotton balls or cotton rounds on a regular basis, you should consider using reusable cotton rounds instead. You can buy a pack on Amazon with a mesh bag to put them in to wash in the washing machine, or you could make your own after old t-shirts you don’t wear anymore.
If you use them with a toner while doing your skincare routine, you're cutting down on the single-use cotton you used to create every day. If you want to use them with makeup remover, they could work for you too, or you could also consider special microfiber towels that can remove makeup on their own instead of using a makeup wipe.
While buying notebooks and bottles made out of recycled materials are a good option, it’s not always the best option. It could just be a sign of greenwashing if this is the only thing the company does that is “sustainable” or “eco-friendly.” However, items you're literally buying to just throw away, like trash bags or gift wrapping, are great to get out of recycled materials because that means a ton of virgin resources went into creating actual trash. This puts use into our recycling system, so there's more of a need to actually use the recycled materials.
If you take out your trash every day or every other day, you could also consider compostable trash bags because they break down—but you shouldn’t expect them to hold the trash all week, especially if you're throwing away fruit or vegetables that start to decompose quickly because it could trigger the trash bag to start decomposing before you have a chance to take it out and that’s not good. But if you take your trash out regularly or only throw away things that don’t decompose because you have a compost for everything else, a compostable trash bag could be a good low waste solution for you.
Yes, there are stores that offer recycle programs for shopping bags if you take them back to the store, like at Walmart—but these don’t always work how they are supposed to. There are several problems with the recycling system right now, not only with what most centers are able to recycle, but also if they are even able to do anything with the product after it has been processed.
The best thing to do with shopping bags is to not use them at all or have only a couple of strong bags that you can reliably take to the store to get your weekly groceries. Having too many reusable bags could create just as much waste as using the shopping bags, so be sure to be mindful of what and how many bags you choose. A great hack is to actually have the cashier put your groceries back in the cart without a bag, roll it out to your car, then put the groceries in a laundry basket so you could even carry them all in in one trip!
We’re not going to lie, these swaps will take some getting used to. There’s a reason why tampons and pads are so popular; there's hardly any maintenance, and you don’t have to worry about the mess—you just throw it away. However, it could probably serve us all to get more familiar with our natural processes.
If you love using tampons, a period cup would be good to look into as an alternative. There's a ton of helpful information out there on how to properly clean and wear the cups to have a zero-waste period. If you prefer pads, period underwear is probably your best bet over reusable pads that have a tendency to move around too much. Both of these are more expensive up-front than buying a box of pads or tampons, but it would save you money in the long-run to save up and buy these products over time.
If you love using straws or need to use straws, you don’t have to be limited to just single-use straws, whether they are the plastic ones or the gross paper ones. Stainless steel straws have become very popular, but there are also glass straws. But if that seems too risky, there are also silicone straws, all of which are nearly infinitely reusable.
Realistically, you don’t need to use a straw a lot of the time, but some people do, while others just prefer it. Silicone straws are durable, and if you get the medical or food grade they're made with non-toxic chemicals. These are great if you need a more flexible option than stainless steel or glass—and all of these are better options than any single use straw!
Toothpaste tabs go along the same lines as using bar soap instead of liquid soaps. It takes a lot of resources and water to create toothpaste and toothpaste gels. Not only that, but the packaging that the majority of toothpastes come in is not recyclable or repurposable at all.
Instead, look into toothpaste tabs. They look like pills that you chew in your mouth and turn into a paste activated by your spit. Sounds kind of gross, but many people actually like using the tabs after they get used to it. They also come in a bottle that's way easier to recycle or repurpose. If you can’t stand these tabs, instead look for toothpaste packaged in a 100% aluminum tube, which is easier to recycle once cleaned out.
