Here is what we learned in 2023 from buying sustainably for our home and ourselves.
1. For the most part, buying a sustainable product, not wrapped in plastic, simplifies your life. When you decide to seek out more earth friendly options, you have more time to deal with other things in your life rather than worry about more micro-plastics in your body, putting plastic in your recycling bin only to know it won’t get recycled or thinking about what harmful chemicals are lurking in your products. It frees up your precious time.
2. If a large corporation is behind whatever ‘sustainable’ product is being advertised, like Proctor & Gamble’s Tide, take all their claims with a enormous grain of salt. Greenwashing is the norm. Some of these corporations sustainability pages are quite, unintentionally, funny.
3. It is very easy to get fooled into thinking a company or a product is being truly, earth-friendly. So if you find out your favorite soap company buys plastic offsets and still uses plastic packaging, (which you were willing to deal with since you really liked what the company was all about) don’t get upset with yourself. You’ve learned something. Move on to a better company.
4. We learned what plastic offsets were and how gravely disappointed we were to see Grove Collaborative, among others, pay to burn plastic in underserved parts of the world just so they can claim to be “plastic neutral,” and lure customers into thinking that’s a good thing. Buring plastic to fuel cement kilns is worse than burning coal. Or hey, just stop selling plastic as that is plastic neutral too.
5. Some of the things we hoped we would keep buying turned out to be inadequate. Disappointment usually came in the form of a product falling out of its intended container (we had high hopes for the Dove refillable deodorant) or not melting completely in my washing machine or just being a stupid price for having to add my own water AND help save the environment.
6. It’s not easy to find products in stores that are not in plastic. Most times you will have to shop online.
