The one with the zero waste beauty routine

I've had a lot of requests from friends for zero waste beauty swaps, so let's go. Personal care is an area where we are always using up and replacing products, so it is a great place to make some plastic free swaps. 

My (mostly) plastic free swaps

Here's a little update of where I am in my journey to plastic free personal care. I am still definitely a work in progress.  Note that this post includes my affiliate links to some items because my classroom can always use more books. You'll pay the same price either way, but if you use my links, Amazon will have to share some of the money with me 😎

Dental Care: 

I've already written about dental care options. I still love my biodegrade-able dental floss and bamboo tooth brushes. Since that post I found some toothpaste tablets I like. Weldental Chewtab Advanced Whitening Toothpaste Tablets with Nano Hydroxyapatite They come in paper packaging and get stored in a metal tube. They use nano hydroxyapatite instead of fluoride for remineralizing tooth enamel and they are also a pretty good whitening agent. I linked to a lit review about it above. 

Hair Care: 

And, I am still loving my shampoo and conditioner bars that I wrote about in March. At the time I was ordering them directly from The Earthling Company, but I found out you can also get them from Amazon. Which, I admit is more convenient for me. 

I don't really use any other hair care products. Today I posted a bunch of samples on our local gifting group because they have all been sitting in my drawer since before I started this blog and I just won't ever use them. It was nice to get the space back in the drawer. 

Skincare: 

Skincare has been the most interesting low-waste adjustment, mostly because I had, okay still have, lots of back-stock and samples. I really went a year without buying any more sunscreen for my face in plastic bottles and I still have some of that left. I decided I really wanted to try out some sunscreen in glass packaging before I ran out of my existing stock. I told myself I needed to find out what I liked and what would work for me. 

My favorite face sunscreen that comes in glass is from The Mad Hippie. It has a glass bottle with a plastic pump on top. I checked their website to see if I could order refills without the plastic pump. You can't, but they do partner with Terra Cycle where you can order a free small take back bag to send back any plastic parts from Mad Hippie products. (I just ordered mine.) The sunscreen itself is great. You have to shake it before you use it, but it goes on really well. It's thin, more like a liquid than a cream. I like that I can buy this at my local Sprouts grocery store. 

My second favorite sunscreen packaged in glass is ECLIPSE Sheer Mineral Sunscreen from Earth Harbor. Their products are available from Amazon or their own website, but the sunscreen is not on Amazon. One thing I like about this one is you can order refills (only through their website) that come without the plastic pump. Then you just move the pump from your empty bottle to the new bottle. The glass bottle is recyclable of course. This one is thicker, more like a traditional sunscreen, and I think it made me break out more, but that was not a well controlled experiment. 

Face Wash:

In either case, if you are wearing sunscreen during the day, you need to wash your face at night. I've been using the same bar from The Earthling Co. for an embarrassing number of years. Yeah, I mean the exact same bar. The thing just lasts forever. It's their tea tree and oatmeal facial soap. And now I'm worried because I can't find it on their website, so I guess I am glad that it looks like I still have a few years left on it. I keep it on a wooden soap dish and I never pick it up. I just run my wet hand over the top of it and then wash my face. A gentle bar of facial soap can last years longer than anything that comes in a package. Since Earthling co. doesn't seem to carry mine anymore, I'm going to suggest these are a close dupe. They come in a two pack so give one to a friend. 

Face Serum:

As a woman of a certain age, face serums are often part of my routine. I've tried some from Mad Hippie, and I really like Celestine from Earth Harbor, but the one I keep coming back to is Good Genes by Sunday Riley. It comes in a glass bottle with a plastic pump. It is pricy, (for me) but I think worth it. 

Make Up: 

Let's talk make up. I don't wear a lot. The less you wear, the less you need to buy. Two things I need (or think I need) are mascara and lipstick. Mascara most often comes in a plastic tube. My first solution was from Lush, and that was great until they changed their take back program for mascara. (Very disappointed in them for that one.) But with a little research I found Izzy. Their mascara comes in a metal tube, and in a re-useable mailer. Every three months they send me a new one and I send back the old one for reuse. Reuse is even better than recycling, so I'm feeling like that's a win. They also have a lot of other zero waste cosmetic solutions. 

For lipstick I still have a back stock, and I have a favorite that comes in a small plastic tube. I don't know yet if I'll be able to give that one up. I am pretty sure I will rationalize my way to buying more with a justification that I have cut so much other plastic packaging out of my life already. But I'm still considering options.

Occasionally, I need some concealer and I found some good options on Etsy. Just search Etsy zero waste makeup for lots of options. You'll find everything from organic herbal eyeshadows, to foundations and mascaras. You name it, someone on Etsy is making a small batch organic version of it. I got my concealer from River Organics. I think I got the full size, but I recommend the sample size if you don't use it that often. It comes in a cardboard dish like thing. it's far better to support small businesses than the larger beauty industry anyway. 

Body Wash: 

LOL, I'm still using up soaps I've brought home from hotels over the years. Someday I may actually get to buying soap for myself. There are lots of ways to buy soap package free, from the farmers market to my local Sprouts and even some nice options at Lush. Soap is not a problem. 

The challenge of zero waste and personal care is just the sheer volume of personal care products stashed in my bathroom. For years I subscribed to one of those services that sends you samples ever month. I used a lot and gave away many, but there is still a lot left. All of it needs to be used up, given away, or trashed as I simplify what I keep and what I use. 

I added a compost collector to my bathroom so that compostable things like hair, q-tips, and my favorite dental floss don't need to go in the trash. 

I switched the family to bamboo toilet paper (that's not wrapped in plastic), first through Grove and then Amazon. It's way better than buying a giant plastic bag at Costco that had six smaller plastic bags of toilet paper inside it. 

I still use up some plastic packaged item every few weeks and then I look at my options. Do I need to replace this product? (Sometimes I really don't.) Can I make a version of it myself? (I'm looking at you sugar scrub.) Is there a plastic free or refill alternative? Often the answer to one of those questions will keep me from buying another plastic bottle. I hope some of the options above will help you do the same. 

The one where I make my own yogurt

I always knew reducing household trash would be a process. I knew it would take months, if not years, to finish using up plastic packaged products before buying plastic free alternatives. I'm looking at you, lip balms. 

Groceries are still one of the largest sources of single use plastics, and yeah, I've switched to bulk buying for many things, and I even found milk in glass bottles, when it's in stock. I've written before about making my own lemonade to keep plastic jugs out of the recycling bin. Now I have another DIY grocery staple to make myself, yogurt. No more quart size plastic tubs, or individual plastic cups.

Making my own yogurt is remarkably easy. It takes very little hands on time, maybe 5-10 minutes, and it is arguably healthier because I'm not using any added sugar. (This is good for you. You'll get used to it.)

*I would like to pause for a moment and acknowledge my lactose privilege. If digesting milk products is an issue for you, I apologize that I have no alternatives to offer here. 

I searched [make your own yogurt] on line and read several sets of recipes. You can search on your own too, but since you're already here, this is how I do it. 

You'll need: 

• 1-1.5 quart crock pot (I already had one. I'm giving you a link to Amazon, but you can probably find one at a thrift store too. It is best to get the kind where you can separate the ceramic part from the heating part. It just makes it easier to store your finished yogurt.)
• A digital thermometer (I already had one of those too. I linked you to a low cost one, but you might take this opportunity to invest in a better one.)
• 1 quart of milk (I usually use 2% and I can get these in glass deposit bottles from a local market. If you can't find milk in returnable glass, remember that throwing away a paper milk carton is better than throwing away a bunch of plastic yogurt containers.)
• 1 container of yogurt with live active cultures (I bought a Oui vanilla one because those come in cute glass jars and I already had lids for them. The simpler the flavor the better.)
• 1 large bath towel (No link because I really hope you already have a towel.)

Directions: 

1. Heat the milk in the crock pot to 180°. This takes 2-3 hours for me. If you have less time choose the high setting and it takes about 1 hour. If you really need to speed up this step, heat the milk slowly on the stove to 180° and then pour it into the crock pot. (I've accidentally heated the milk over 200° and it still turned out fine. It just took longer to cool.) Getting the milk to 180° changes something about the structure of the protein so it will be ready to become yogurt. (I'm an English teacher not a scientist.)
2. Take your starter yogurt out of the fridge when the milk gets to 180°. Don't do anything with it. Just let it come to room temperature while the milk cools off. 
3. Let the milk cool down to 120° in the crock pot. Unplug the crock pot and let it cool off. This usually takes about another 2 hours. Use your digital thermometer to monitor the temp as it cools. Cracking the lid a bit helps. Setting timers to remind yourself to check the temperature helps too. 
4. When the milk reaches 120° scoop about a cup of the warm milk into a small bowl and add the room temperature yogurt. Stir them together. (Measurement of how much you take out to mix with the starter yogurt isn't critical.)
5. Add the mixed milk and yogurt back to the crock pot, give it a stir, and put the lid on. 
6. Wrap the whole crock pot in a large towel. I use a large bath towel folded in half. I set the crock pot in the middle and fold up each corner so that they overlap. Then I turn a small bowl upside down on top of it all. This helps to hold the towel in place. Note that the crock pot is UNPLUGGED. (I am not responsible for electrical fires caused by any failure to follow these directions. Heck, I'm not responsible even if you follow the directions exactly either. Make yogurt at your own risk. It's not supposed to be dangerous.)
7. Walk away for 10-12 hours. (I usually go to bed.)
8. In the morning, lift the ceramic insert from your crock pot and move the insert to the fridge. Leave the cover on. (I told you you'd be happy if you had the kind of crock pot with a removable ceramic part.)

Tips: 

Often my yogurt has extra fluid. You can choose to spoon this out or mix it in. It's a matter of personal choice. I like my yogurt thicker, so I tend to spoon it out. Just depress a table spoon into the top of the chilled yogurt and it should fill with clear liquid. When you scoop yogurt out, more liquid will probably seep into the space. You can spoon that out as you go, or mix it in. 

This yogurt will taste very tart if you are not used to unsweetened yogurt. Until you adjust, I suggest adding a few teaspoons of honey to your serving. Adding berries and granola helps too. Slowly reduce the amount of honey you add and eventually you'll be eating sugar free yogurt. Well, except for the granola 😎

I have also found it is really easy to make my own granola, but I'll have to share that process in another post. 

Oh, very IMPORTANT, before you enjoy all of your fabulous yogurt, SAVE some to use as a starter for your next batch. If you used a Oui yogurt to start this batch, then just clean that container and fill it with some of your new yogurt. It will help if you have some of these lids handy. Keep your new starter yogurt in the fridge for up to two weeks and then use it to make more yogurt. 

Timing: I have found it is best to start this process at about 4:00 in the afternoon. This means the crock pot is wrapped and ready to rest between 9-10 and I can go to bed. I know we can't always start our yogurt at 4:00. That's why I offered the suggestion of warming the milk on the stove. You'll have a sauce pan to wash, but it will make the process faster. The milk will cool faster too because you are pouring it into a cold crock pot. 

Now you know that making your own yogurt is easy. I get to make less trash and enjoy my own sugar free yogurt for breakfast. I've been working this plan for several months now. It's a great way to reduce plastic waste, un-process my diet, and consume less sugar. 

And, if you are one of the people who has had to hear me say, "Did I mention I'm making my own yogurt now?" this post is dedicated to you. 

If you are the friend who told me 25 years ago that I could do this, you know who you are, thank you. 

The one with the zero waste grocery store

I am so lucky to live in a city that has a zero waste grocery store. The Mighty Bin is the amazing labor of love from, Isabelle DeMillan. This is a storefront grocery store in the North Park neighborhood of San Diego. 

The idea is that shoppers bring their own clean containers and refill from hundreds of items sold in bulk. When I arrive, they weigh my containers and either write the weight on the bottom, or use an elastic band to add a tag that electronically holds the information about the weight. As I fill each container they add the item to my tab until I am ready to check out. 

BYO Containers:

Unlike other grocery places, where bringing my own containers makes me an unusual customer, at the Mighty Bin it is totally normal, accepted, and encouraged to for me to walk in with a collection of bottles, canisters, and canvas bags to fill with my groceries. They even accept donations of bottles and jars to give to people who don't have containers, or need an extra one. These get cleaned and sterilized at the store before becoming available to customers. (I donate bottles to reduce our recycling, and so they get reused.)

The reason I love The Mighty Bin is because they have items I can not find in bulk anywhere else. Yes, I live within a mile of a Sprouts, and they have great bulk bins for many of my regular items, salt, sugar, flour, rice, oats etc. The Mighty Bin has all those things too, but there are specific things I can't find in the bulk section of other stores that are available there. Plus The Mighty Bin has liquid things that I can not buy in bulk anywhere else. 

Bulk items I can find there that I can't find elsewhere: 

Arborio rice, baking soda, roasted garbanzo beans, dried blueberries, pretzels, spaghetti and other pasta shapes. 

Liquid items that are hard to find in bulk elsewhere: 

Olive oil, vinegars, sesame oil, maple syrup, honey, dish soap. (I love being able to buy vinegar this way for cleaning, cooking, and laundry.)

They also have a rotating variety of frozen items, which I really appreciate. 

And there is a peanut butter machine we are eager to try once we use up our back stock of peanut butter in jars. 

Here is their full list of products they carry. 

The Best Grocery Store:

The Mighty Bin also partners with lots of local businesses organizations to recycle plastic, collect e-waste, offer classes, order flowers or subscribe to a community supported agriculture box. Check out their Instagram feed for the latest events and ongoing initiatives. 

If you live in the San Diego area a trip to the Mighty Bin is a fun adventure in shopping without packaging. It's a great way to reuse containers you already have. I encourage you to make it a regular part of your grocery rotation. 

Oh, and they were recently voted Best Grocery Store by San Diego Magazine's Reader's Picks. Yay!

The one with the green bin

This is not a drill. The city crew delivered a green bin to our house yesterday. I've looked forward to this for months now. So much of our trash was food waste. Yes, I am working on making less of that, but when I juice lemons for lemonade I still end up with lemon rinds to throw away. 

Now all food waste, rinds, leftovers goes in the green bin. We also get to include all yard trimmings, leaves, and untreated wood like that weird short log we've had in a corner for a long time. It also turns out we produce a lot of compostable materials in the bathroom: hair, q-tips, and biodegradable dental floss, so I'm going to need a compost container in there. 

But, as tempting as it is to buy some new compost bins, I'm going to take a deep breath and start with containers we already have. The city delivered a "small" food scraps bucket with the green bin, but it is ugly and flimsy. I don't want to see it on the counter and I think it may fall apart quickly with heavy use. 

Yesterday, I gave a good scrubbing to the OXO compost bin we used to use when I pretended I was composting in the back yard. It had some suspicious brown stains on the inside, but vinegar and baking soda were remarkably effective. It's cute and functional, but when it came time to make lemonade and dinner I remembered I had a white three gallon bucket in the garage. I called it the dinner bucket. It was easy to throw food scraps into, and scrape plates into, and after dinner it got dumped in the green bin without hassle. For ease of use, you just can't beat a short term compost bucket without a lid to get in the way.

The challenge now will be adapting my family and myself to these new habits. We have to find a way to store and move food scraps on a daily basis. We have to get used to making a trip to the green bin after dinner, and maybe more often than that. We have to re-evaluate how much non-organic trash we make and adjust the sizes of containers we need for food scraps, trash and recycling. 

You know you're a #zerowaste geek when the arrival of the green bin in the highlight of your week.

The one where I travel by car

Traveling via road trip is one of those times where I typically would use a lot of disposable items, mostly related to food, but also small toiletry items, paper hotel bills, bottled water, plastic bags, etc. 

Planning for traveling with less trash takes some thinking ahead, and some different choices, but it's really not that hard. Let's take a look at my thought process by category. 

Note: This post contains some affiliate links. Some are for items I bought, liked, and recommend. Other links go to items similar to things I got as gifts/swag from conferences. 

Food: 

This is the toughest. Fast food is so easily accessible and delicious, but it does generate a lot of trash. Choice is my tool here. I can choose food places that serve on reuse-able tableware. Panera is a favorite option for that reason, but there are also lots of local restaurants worth trying. Taking the time to get off the highway, and sit down at a restaurant is a good way to make less trash and enjoy the trip more. Google maps now makes it possible to find good food options that aren't within sight of the highway. And when friends tell me about good places to eat in their towns, I add those to my "want to go" saved section in Google Maps. 

Of course many places still want to hand me a plastic cup, so I plan ahead and keep a re-useable tumbler cup in my car. This comes in very handy. I can use it for a drink at a fast casual restaurant and also fill it with water in the hotel lobby. Plus, sometimes a restaurant won't even charge me for the drink if I brought my own cup. 

Snacks are readily available in bulk bins. I bring them along in canvas bags, or Stasher bags. This also helps me not spend money at convenience stores. 

Plastic utensils eventually show up in every road trip, so I bring a fork and spoon wrapped in a bandana. The silverware stays clean and the bandana is a re-useable napkin. I've never really needed a knife, but if I think I might need it I could add that to the kit. Some people like a bamboo utensil kit to save weight, but I tend to pack light enough that it's not an issue. Note: If you are getting take out food, you need to specify that you do not need utensils.

Hotels almost always have a coffeemaker and paper cups to go with it. My camping mug was an unexpected gift from an edtech vendor. I didn't think I would use it much, and then I thought about making tea in a hotel room. I would have to use a paper cup provided by the hotel to fit into the one cup machine. I remembered the camping mug and brought it along. It fit perfectly in the coffee maker, and I didn't have to trash a paper cup. One of the things I like about this mug is that it has no handle, making it easier to pack. The lid means I can use it to pack small items too. Apparently, it is hard to find one without a handle. This Yeti one is similar though. 

Water:

I mentioned filling my tumbler cup with water from the hotel lobby. On road trips I also usually bring 1-2 large water bottles that I filled at home. If needed I can refill these while traveling. Often I travel for conferences and there are usually water stations set up I can refill from. This way I never cave to the $7 bottle of water in a hotel room. (I'm not kidding. That was the actual price of the bottle in my hotel room a few weeks ago. And it was not a very fancy hotel.)

Toiletries:

Ahh, the travel sizes. They are so cute. I used to love going to the wall of bins at the drug store and paying a premium for little bottles of shampoo, sunscreen, and other assorted mini versions... of things I already owned in larger sizes. Of course I also owned cheap tiny refillable bottles that leaked sometimes. And I subscribed to one of those beauty samples boxes that sent me 5-6 small sizes of things every month, many of which became "save for travel" items. Then I would get out on the road and find out I didn't really like that product after all. 

It was in 2020 that I bought my set of Cadence capsules. Fair warning, these are pricy, but they are great for travel. I can easily fill them with the products I already use. (No more buying expensive travel sizes of items I'm not sure I'll like.) And, if I consider what I've saved by not buying travel sizes, these have paid for themselves. Plus, I always have exactly the same products I use at home. No surprises. These capsules never leak. Really, the caps fit tight and I've never had a leak issue through lots of flying and driving. They are adorable, and they magnetically stick to each other to keep them together. The lid labels are also magnetic and swap-able. 

The printing on the lids is often hard for me to read without my glasses, not ideal for the shower, so I swap the label tiles from different colored containers to create color combinations I can distinguish. Each original capsule is .56 oz, which is not large. Now, they make bigger versions too, but I have never felt the need for a larger size. 

Part of the reason some people say they want larger Cadence capsules is to carry shampoo. Since I cary a piece of a solid shampoo bar, I don't worry about that. I wrote about my favorite shampoo bars here. 

Grocery Bags: 

In any road trip there comes a time when I need to buy something, so I always cary an expandable bag. If I'm in my own car, there will also be standard sized re-useable grocery bags in the trunk, but the expandable bag is great to keep in my purse. I have a really compact one that was swag from a vendor a long time ago. I've tried to find similar versions of it to give as gifts. These were as close as I could get. I like that they come in a three pack. I put one in my daily backpack and gifted the others to family members. 

Paper: 

A lot of the paper is already out of our travel process these days anyway. Think boarding pass on your phone and hotels that email you the bill. (That sentence would make absolutely no sense to my grandmother, who was an amazing traveler in her day.) I still manage to cut a little more paper here and there, like refusing the map of the local area the hotel receptionist tried to hand me and choosing paperless receipts. 

With a little forethought, some planning, and by brining along just a few extra items, I was able to remove a lot of the trash from my road trips and make myself more comfortable in the process. 

The one with less recycling in the blue bin

Recycling is one of those things that makes me feel good. I've always considered myself very good at recycling. Our blue bin has never contained trash and always had clean, dry recyclables. I regularly checked the flyer from the city to make sure the things I put in there really were recyclable. I broke down boxes so I could fit more in. Our recycling cans, yes I have two, were often full on pick up day. 

Folks who know about zero waste, say you should do a trash audit, so you can see what you are throwing away and then take steps to reduce those things. I kind of skipped that step, but I know pretty well what we are throwing away. 

The things is, our trash production is actually quite small. At this point we are usually trashing one thirteen gallon white plastic trash bag a week. Sometimes two, but mostly just the one. 

But the recycling 🙄. In the days before I started trying to reduce waste, we regularly filled both blue trash cans on the weeks our recycling was picked up. At the time I actually thought this was a good thing. "Look how much of our waste we recycle!"

Now, I know better. I shop differently, and I have found some other ways to divert things from our recycling bins. Reuse for the win!

Cardboard

We are happy online shoppers. I don't see that changing. We like our weekly meal plan box. (I'll write more about meal planning at some point, but the meal plan box is less wasteful than it sounds.) We order pet food online. Buying just the one thing I need online is better than going to a store and talking myself into buying more things. So we have boxes. I used to break them down. I still do that for some small ones, but now I make sure to remove any plastic packing tape first, so they can actually be recycled. 

What I discovered, is that I can give away boxes in our local gifting group. (I wrote about the gifting group here.) There are always people getting ready to move, or moving things into storage, or in need of a shipping box. The trick I found, is to wait until I have 5-6 medium to large boxes. This typically takes about 3-4 weeks, and I'm lucky to have an out of the way place to stack them. No one wants to come pick up one box, but they do like a solid collection. Once I have a critical mass, I take a picture and post it on the gifting group. A grateful person, who doesn't have to buy as many brand new boxes, picks them up from my porch the next day. The boxes get reused and I don't have to break them down or fit them in my recycling can. 

Jam Jars

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are popular in our house. So is jam on toast. Therefore we have a favorite strawberry jam that I get at a local market, okay it's Trader Joes. Their reduced sugar strawberry jam comes in an adorable 12 oz glass jar with a nice gold lid. When I started shopping in bulk bins, I needed a way to store items like gummy bears, and other things that I didn't already have pantry storage for. I started taking the labels off these jam jars and they are so perfect for storing all kinds of things. The jars aren't going in our recycling bin anymore, and I keep finding new ways to use them. Peanut butter jars (we buy that in glass now) and wide mouthed salsa jars are also great reuse containers. And I have a pretty solid plan about how donate these when I have too many, but that's another post. 

Drink Bottles

In the past, my family consumed a lot of drinks that came in plastic jugs, usually the half gallon size. Lots of lemonade came into our house that way, but also iced tea, juices, etc. (See the plastic bottle in the image above? That's the last one I bought. We finally used them all up.) Then it occurred to me that it couldn't be that hard to make lemonade. I had lemons from our CSA box, and I've found that sometimes a neighbor picks their tree and leaves out a box of free lemons. I can turn four lemons into 64 oz of lemonade in under ten minutes. I'll put my recipe below. Boom, a major source of bulky plastic stopped showing up in our recycling bin. The version in the picture above is actually made with grapefruit juice because we got grapefruit in the CSA last week and I figured I'd try it. Works great with the same recipe. I got the glass jar on Amazon, so I wouldn't have to store lemonade in a plastic jug. It fits on the shelf in the fridge door just as well. 

Laundry Soap Jugs

I have written previously about my switch to laundry sheets. I've been using them for months now and I'm still really happy with that choice. I didn't have a jug of laundry soap to recycle very often, but those will no longer appear in our recycling can either.  I still want to be able to have bleach around for some uses, but I have learned I can buy it in tablets that come in a much smaller (though still plastic) bottle. So no more bleach jugs either. 

Cleaning Products

I'm not a big fan of cleaning. I'm learning now that part of my lack of enthusiasm came from really hating chemical cleaning agents. One day during the pandemic, it occurred to me to put on an N95 mask while spraying the shower tiles, it helped, but the product still made my eyes sting. No thank you. And of course those products came in plastic bottles. Even when I dutifully bought refill jugs instead of new spray bottles, I was still adding plastic to my recycling bin. 

Looking for ways to reduce plastic made me finally break down and try one of those brands where you buy the glass spray bottles and refill them with concentrates or dissolving tablets. I won't specify which one I'm trying, because I haven't tried the others and I don't feel excessively well informed about the variations. But I will say I love how well these products work, and how much they do not irritate my eyes, nose and throat. They smell good too. My cat, who used to run when I cleaned, actually comes to investigate when I start cleaning with these. I think he likes the smell of it too. My house is cleaner and there is less plastic waste in the blue bin. 

Full disclosure: I am still working through what's left in some of those plastic refill jugs. There are at least 4-5 of them still in my garage. The use-it-up part of switching to zero waste takes patience. I got serious about this in February of 2023. It's May now and we are just starting to be done using some of our plastic packaged items. Eventually, I may finally admit that I should gift things I don't want to use anymore, but in this case, that feels like passing the problem on to someone else. 

Paper

Oh, I'm going to need a whole separate post about reducing paper. It's a process I've been working on for years. 

What's still in the recycling bin? 

Well, paper, I'm still working on that. Some food packaging, mostly steel cans from pet food, and milk cartons. I tried to get my people to switch to milk that came in a glass jug that I could return for a deposit. The funny thing is the fancy glass jar milk came with a layer of cream on top of the milk. I think the dairy considered 'cream top' a feature. My younglings considered it a bug and would not drink lumpy milk. I thought it was delicious, but I couldn't drink all of a 1/2 gallon myself before it went bad. My husband has switched to getting his 1/2 and 1/2 in the pint size glass jars though, and we return it for the $3 deposit, so that's one less small carton in our waste stream every week. 

Making less recycling seems as much or more important than making less trash. The truth is we already made very little trash when I started to consciously try to make less, but we were proudly generating a lot of recycling. As I look for ways to cut single use plastics, and reuse items before recycling them, we are slowly bringing down the volume of recycling in the blue bin. We need to put it out for collection next week, but this time it will be just one can instead of two. Progress. 

The one with the dental floss

Yeah, it's a little thing, probably the smallest thing I throw away on a regular basis. And, to be perfectly honest, I probably have not contributed as much dental floss to landfills as my dentist would like me too. 

But, hey, every little bit counts, and it turns out there are some really easy ways to stop using plastic in my dental care routine. All of these things avoid plastic in their packaging too.

1. Bamboo toothbrushes: You probably already know about these. I've been using them for years, even before I decided to make a conscious effort to use less plastic. I haven't been entirely successful in getting the rest of my family to use them, but that may change eventually. It's been great being able to tell my dentist I don't need a new plastic toothbrush.

2. Bamboo electric toothbrush heads: These were new to me. My dental hygienist strongly encouraged me to get an electric toothbrush. I resisted because I love my bamboo toothbrushes. Then a family member bought an electric toothbrush at Costco and it came as a pack of two, because Costco. The extra one she didn't need became mine and I resigned myself to buying plastic brush heads for it. But, behold, there are bamboo replacement heads now. I've been using it for months and so far no issues. Some reviews say people don't like the feel of wood in their mouth, but I was used to using a bamboo toothbrush anyway. Eventually, I'll need some pliers to pull out the bristles and compost the brush head in our city collected organic waste bin, which I don't have yet because that program is still in it's roll out phase. 

3. Biodegradable Dental Floss: I LOVE this stuff. I even floss more regularly because I get to use this adorable little glass container with this floss that feels like it is really cleaning between my teeth. First you buy the starter kit with the tiny glass jar and three spools. Then you just need the refills after that. It took me about two months to use up my first spool, so I'd guess the starter kit is a six months supply. The refill pack has five spools. A few disclaimers, we previously bought a warehouse store pack of plastic floss, so we still have some of that to use up. Also, I have one place where my teeth are very tight. Sometimes, I can't get in there with the biodegradable floss and I have to revert to the thin plastic stuff for that corner of my mouth. The reviews that complain that the biodegradable floss is not as strong are correct. It does break sometimes in tight spaces. I can live with that. It's part of the adventure. This picture is from my first spool once it was almost used up. 

4. Dental floss picks: One member of my family prefers floss picks. He has a lot, but once he uses those up we will switch to a variety that are biodegradable. 

5. Toothpaste: I honestly use very little. I don't have a replacement to recommend here, because we haven't gotten through the supply of back stock of toothpaste we have. Seriously, we may need a year or more to go through all the toothpaste currently in our drawers. Once all of that is gone, I'll look at the options. I know there are a lot of choices. Toothpaste tablets, with and without fluoride, abound. Let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions. 

I've linked to versions I bought or am considering buying next, but you may also be able to find these things near you at a local health food store or refill shop. Whenever possible I encourage you to shop locally for your #zerowaste items and support those small businesses. 

Note: This post and others includes one or more affiliate links. I usually only link to products I actually bought, use, like, and recommend. In this case, I did link to one item I plan to buy in the future. I'm a teacher. If you use one of my affiliate links, you are contributing toward books for my classroom while buying something you want anyway.