Five Sustainable Swaps: Save Money and the Earth
Small changes with a big impact on the planet and your pocket
Climate change is a problem exponentially becoming more important, with increasingly dire repercussions on our planet if we do not change. Although there are still nonbelievers out there, I’m happy to see an increased amount of people having dialogue on ways they can be more sustainable. There are more and more people admitting we need to change our habits in order for our planet to survive.
I’ve mentioned this before, but we don’t need people that are perfectly sustainable, but rather everyone taking small steps to be more eco-conscious. As I try to become more sustainable, I’m always looking for innovative changes I can make in my own life that will pay off for the long-term health of the planet. I’m choosing to focus on small changes because these changes can be made immediately and are low-cost investments that yield financial rewards for the long-term. Here is a list of five of my favorite eco-swaps I found!
1. Reusable Cotton Rounds
If you’re like me, you often turn to makeup wipes to quickly get rid of makeup. Although it may not seem like a lot of waste, it adds up quickly. In fact, according to The Zoe Report:
Upwards of 20 million single-use makeup wipes are tossed in the trash every day.
Twenty million wipes. Every. Single. Day. I often find myself making excuses that you’ve probably made, too: it’s just one wipe, makeup wipes are so much easier, and they’re so easy to travel with, to name a few. But, when you think about the cost, you can immediately make your money back with one switch, spending that $6–7 on a few cotton rounds. Or, if you want to buy a larger pack, you can make your money back with a swap of two packs of wipes. I still have a pack of wipes left, but will be switching to reusable rounds after that. I hope you’ll join me!
2. Reusable Baggies and Bags
No matter if you’re heading to the office, spending a day at school, or packing a picnic, you’re likely turn to plastic baggies to store chips, apple slices, or your favorite homemade cookies. Like the cotton rounds, baggies are an item most households use on a daily basis without a second thought. It’s a quick, disposable way to keep food organized and safe when it’s on the move. I recently found out that many companies are selling bags that can be hand-washed, hung to dry, and reused as many times as you want. This swap ties in closely with reusable bags, which are popular at grocery shops. I couldn’t find a statistic specific to lunchbox size baggies, but I was able to find one for grocery bags. According to the Center for Biological Diversity:
Americans use 100 billion plastic bags a year, which require 12 million barrels of oil to manufacture
Again, it’s a small change, but over the course of your life, can save so much plastic from the landfills.
3. Dryer Balls
If you’re looking for a switch to fabric softener, this is your solution. These balls are often made out of either wood or plastic, yet accomplish the same thing as dryer sheets. According to Asheville GreenWorks, a non-profit environmental organization:
Wool dryer balls are a simple swap for dryer sheets. Made of natural material, they will biodegrade after use, do not contain toxic chemicals, and can be re-used for up to 1000 loads. Wool dryer balls replace dryer sheets in function by softening clothes and reducing static cling.
Again, as with the cotton rounds and baggies, the long-term cost of this sustainable option is much lower than the unsustainable option. So, not only are you reducing your environmental impact, but also saving money! And, if you’re concerned about wool being harvested in an unethical way, since it does come from an animal, you could always choose the plastic dryer ball option.
4. Menstruation Cups
If you’re anything like me, it took you a while for you to realize there are sustainable options to menstruation products. For so long, I thought tampons and pads were the only two options. Not only are tampons and pads expensive and full of chemicals and harmful products, but they also generate a lot of waste. According to OrganiCup:
Tampons, pads and panty liners along with their packaging and individual wrapping generate more than 200,000 tonnes of waste per year, and they all contain plastic — in fact, pads are around 90% plastic!
Although sustainable switches can often be on products that just make our lives easier, this one is especially important. It can greatly help communities that don’t have the same opportunities that privileged ones do. This is to say that menstruation products are necessary in ways that dryer balls or reusable cotton rounds are not. In fact, Global Citizen discusses the importance of this issue:
Globally, 2.3 billion people live without basic sanitation services and in developing countries, only 27% of people have adequate handwashing facilities at home, according to UNICEF. Not being able to use these facilities makes it harder for women and young girls to manage their periods safely and with dignity.
So, not only can the switch from tampons/pads to a menstruation cup save money, but it can also be a long-term solution to those unable to afford or have access to tampons and pads.
5. Refillable Cleaners
As with many of the swaps I mentioned, this is a newer sustainable option I learned about. Most of us use some sort of plastic cleaner, as seen pictured in the image above. However, another option is to use reusable glass bottles with concentrate. Unlike normal cleaning products, the concentrate lasts for much longer because they make more product, and the glass bottles avoid the constant trashing of single-use plastics when the cleaner is used up. I also find that these sustainable cleaners use less harsh chemicals, and aim to be a natural, eco-swap. The EPA even has a section that discusses how to “green” cleaning products, explaining how the wrong product can be hazardous:
Cleaning products are released to the environment during normal use through evaporation of volatile components and rinsing down the drain of residual product from cleaned surfaces, sponges, etc…Certain ingredients in cleaning products can present hazard concerns to exposed populations (e.g., skin and eye irritation in workers) or toxicity to aquatic species in waters receiving inadequately treated wastes (note that standard sewage treatment effectively reduces or removes most cleaning product constituents). For example, alkylphenol ethoxylates, a common surfactant ingredient in cleaners, have been shown in laboratory studies to function as an “endocrine disrupter,” causing adverse reproductive effects of the types seen in wildlife exposed to polluted waters.
If you don’t want to invest in glass bottles, another option could be to buy the concentrate and simply reuse the plastic bottle of the cleaning products you use up. The plastic will not last as long as the glass in most cases, but it is a way to get even more out of the cleaning products you already own.
Closing Thoughts
I think it’s important to note that eco-swaps are not always as straightforward as they seem. To truly get a sense of what is most sustainable, you’d have to track the production back of each item, as there is a chain of production from creation to distribution for every product created. Because of how business works, this chain is often hidden from consumers and hard to track. So, with my swaps, I’m focusing solely on the direct impact on the landfill, rather than trying to track back resources from every single step. I hope that at least one or two of these swaps is something you didn’t know about or hadn’t thought of before. I’m thinking about doing more of these articles, as there are many more swaps I’d be excited to discuss. At the end of the day, I love finding new ways to help me be a better member of Mother Earth, and I hope you’ll do some of these swaps with me.
