ECO-FRIENDLY SWAPS// Ingredients in Soaps and Cleaning Products
Do you know the ingredients of your soaps- what you put on your body, down the sink, into our water system?
Buying a shampoo, laundry, or makeup product is also about deconstructing the object. You’re buying the plastic bottle, the ingredients, the health effects.
One of the easiest eco-friendly swaps is choosing non toxic liquids. I first bought unscented eco dish soap in a plastic bottle (Ecomax unscented baby) and only started to get mine refilled plastic-free later. It’s ok to make slow changes, rather than 100% all in one go. It’s really about what will make something sustainable in the long run, not all-in then burn out. Access to options, time, money, are all real things that can limit our ability to make the decisions we want.
It's a different way of thinking- seeing through branding to what’s actually in the bottle. Greenwashing is common with stuff like dish soap. Just because it looks “green” doesn’t mean it is. Check the ingredients. If you don’t know what they are, look them up, try the Dirty Dozen in cosmetics to start.
Visualize all the plastic bottles of liquid in one store, each item in the shampoo or cleaning isle of Shoppers Drug Mart, all the lipstick or nail polish. It’s a lot of perfumed goo we’re spreading on our bodies and dumping into the earth. What if you squeezed out all the contents of a store at once, imagining the liquids, creams, and gels filling up a bathtub or swimming pool.
All the product in each bottle is going somewhere. It’s like how sunscreen washes off your body into the ocean when you swim.
I try to imagine how I would feel pouring the bottle directly into a body of water with living animals, like fishes and frogs. Holding that gut/heart empathy helps me make different choices because I care about them. Animals have homes just like us.
Stuff we buy, use or put down the drain doesn’t disappear, everything has an impact. Buying isn’t going to solve sustainability issues, but every choice does contribute. Many small actions can come together to form a bigger collective effect. So when when we make decisions about what we buy, we make a choice for everyone.