Reducing our plastic usage isn't as easy as we first thought...

I'm not going to forget this image in a hurry, toothbrushes washed up on the beach. I can't believe I hadn't even thought about toothbrushes being plastic waste before, and had been merrily regularly replacing my plastic stick with another and another. What are the options? There are more and more options for eco-friendly toothbrushes cropping up on the accessible market. We started with some  FETE Bamboo Toothbrushes having seen them on Facebook, they come cardboard packaging and a few colours so all good. Only in medium rigidity but everyone finds them comfy enough. It doesn't take long for the wood to discolour though and the kids got freaked out by the blackness forming on the wood around the bristles. The bristles also keep falling out or coming loose so a regular snipping is needed to maintain them at the same length. There are now loads of bamboo toothbrush products on Amazon which we haven't tried, and would definitely be worth giving a go. Now w...

OK that's not a good look for people trying to reduce their plastic in life. So what are the options for us to change? The obvious one is replacing shower gel with bars of soap, ok we can do that, but how can we replace the shampoo and conditioner? The first thing we're trying is a shampoo bar from Amazon ( J.R. Liggett's, Shampoo Bar, Virgin Coconut & Argan Oil ), looks great and I'm feeling very virtuous but at £11.99 we're hoping their promise of lasting longer than shampoo bottles will turn out to the true. It comes in a paper covering, ok all good so far, and smells... well it doesn't really smell of much so i'm not sure if that's good or bad. The problem is that it's not easy to get any lathering from it, my 8 year old daughter can't get anything off it without my help. As much as I want this to work, the washing experience is harder work. Despite the promise of all natural ingredients being kinder and less drying on my frizz-b...

Pondering our plastic usage, we looked at our recycling bin and realised it was full of empty plastic milk bottles. With kids who love their morning cereal, converting them to non-dairy sources seemed a good solution, unfortunately they were having non of it! Real milk only please they've said, so we've looked at our options.  From the supermarket we can get long life milk in Tetra Pak. Now recyclable, this might seem a good solution, however a quick Google showed us that there is often a lack of the specialist equipment needed to recycle this material. Apparently cartons can't be recycled properly by normal paper mills because of the aluminium or plastic lining that is bonded to the paper. So even if we put it in the recycling bin,  chanced are it will still go to land fill ! Oh dear. A better solution would be to reuse rather than recycle of course, so we've decided to start ordering our milk from the good old milk man ( www.milkandmore.co.uk ). Delivered to the ...

Everyone is feeling the pinch, including councils it seems as our recycling and waste bins are now only picked up once a fortnight. Although this is a pain, it does make us more aware of how much waste and packaging we're going through. Our bins have been bursting with rubbish and we're feeling the guilt! Watching news about how much plastic is filling our oceans, our fish and filling our land makes me feel a tad sick, so it's time to take individual action and sort out our own usage. My daughter is on board and have just come home from school having watched a film about a family who only use one bin bag of waste a year , things like medicine bottles. Well that puts us to shame, we're filling the equivalent of a bag a week, just of plastic. So it's time to take action and sort out our own conscience. We're going to blog about how to we get on minimising our plastic usage, the choices we make and progress that we make! If you have any advice or comments, please...