Reduce/suppress waste in the bathroom

Initially published on 14/06/2011

Use soap!

I mean soap in bar. Contrary to shower gel, soap often comes unpacked or with very few plastic or paper. So right from the start, soap produces less waste. And also, soap lasts much longer: one single soap is equivalent to at least 4 shower gel bottles! Not surprisingly, shower gels generates tons of waste a year! And soap is also cheaper in this regard.

It is a bit harder to replace shampoo so I recommend The Body shop shampoo and gel since the try to produce package with as less plastic as possible. Their Rainforest label products are also biodegradable in water, which is not the case for most gels, contrary to soap.

Think also about big bottles: in proportion it uses less plastic than small bottles.

Drop throwable q-tips

This kind of Q-tips is more about pushing the dirt further, according to me. That is why I rather use something to remove it. With this kind of thing you can (gently) scrape the inside of the ear and remove ear wax. Remove the wax from the ear-cleaner with a wash cloth and do it again until the ear is clean. You can wash the cloth, and reduce the cleaner to the infinite, so it does not produce a single waste and you don't need to buy anymore Q-tips. And since it is very efficient you don't have to do it every day.

If you see a Q-tips on a beach, it was probably thrown in the toilets (it's too thin to be filtered by waste water treatment plant).

Adopt a menstrual cup

Each woman uses about 10 000 tampon or sanitary towels in her life. It's a lot of waste, of money but also of pollution if you include the production of those sanitary protections.

 A menstrual cup or "menskopp" in Norwegian is a feminine protection that you place in your vagina so that it collect the menstruation blood. You just have to empty it -  which is not as disgusting as one could think - twice a day and reuse it again and again. Read more.

Use washable make-up pads

You can either buy them (i am not sure where) or, even cheaper make them yourself: knit them with (ecological*) cotton, for example as a tawashi, or sew them in an old cotton t-shirt or with soft fleece.

Before washing them in the machine, put them in a small net (for example onion net) so it does get stuck in unknown parts of the machine. Read more

* The cotton agriculture is the most polluting in the world because of all the pesticides used.

Depilation: throwable is evil

I could not totally suppress waste in that regard since already prepared cold wax strips are the only thing I bear for bikini line. However I found the perfect wax for legs: Acorelle, made of organic sugar and lemon (in other words, 100%), which comes with reusable strips. You can buy it here.

I recommend those whasheable strips whatever wax you use (no waste) but the good point with Acorelle is that it is so easy to clean, only with water (strips and skin). That is why it does not come with special one-use wipes in individual bags. This tends to bother me when I buy my throwable strips because I use vegetal oil as skincare and it is more that enough to remove the wax.

I also use a razor, a reloadable one, that I use quite long, but without shaving foam. Water is enough for me, so it is a bottle less to buy and to throw.

Reuse cosmetics bottles and make your owns!

You can find many recipes online, like cream, make-up remover, face pack and so on. Personnaly I don't make that to often because I use pure vegetal oil for the skin or clay as a facepack.

However I am quite proud of the last packaging I reused. I had mentionned in a previous article that I was looking for a spray bottle to make a deodorant (with alum stone powder, sodium bicarbonate and water). I still don't have one but I desperately needed something to go camping this weekend.

I tried to break an empty roll on deodorant I had and I actually manage to open and close it again. And it works perfecly. I also noticed that some products was left in it, but it could not go on the bowl. So even if you don't plan to make your own deodorant, you can keep it longer this: put some water in it ; the product left will be liquid enough to stick on the bowl and you will be able to use it to the end!

Sort bathroom waste

To finish with an obvious advice, even bathroom waste can be sorted (if you still need a bathroom bin after this article ; we actually use one for the hair in the shower but it does not fill itself :) ):

Toilet paper roll is cardboard and cosmetic bottles are plastic ;)