Reducing Plastic Is Possible. Here's Where to Start

At this very moment, 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic are in our oceans, with nearly 270,000 tons floating on the waters' surface. Greenpeace says this is enough plastic to circle the earth more than 400 times. Plastic particles exist in our bodies, landfills, food, and drinks. Not only does plastic debris kill an estimated 1 million sea birds and more than 100,000 marine mammals annually, it is impacting humans' health to grave effects. Research continues to show that chemicals found in many plastics are linked to endocrine disruption, cancer, infertility, early puberty, and other health issues.

In an idyllic world, the solution would be to eradicate plastic—but that is not the reality. "More than 430 million tons of plastic are produced each year," states the United Nations. Plastic continues to be in demand, as it provides malleable, affordable means for industries to create products and containers. The power lies in finding the instances where plastic is unnecessary and using more sustainable solutions. The power also lies in finding better ways to deal with plastic waste or reusing old plastic to brilliant new sources. This is critical as two-thirds of the 430 million tons produced is "cast aside as waste after just one use," adds the UN.

This is one of the most large-scale human and environmental health issues of our time. It will take massive collective efforts from companies and from us, in small ways, in our homes. Here, we've rounded up easy product swaps from companies that are either avoiding plastic or reusing it intelligently.

Plastic can seem like a daunting problem to tackle, but we can make a dent—a giant one. Cumulatively, our habit changes and adjustments have a big impact. 

Blisshaus Baking Pantry Set
All-glass and chic, these jars make for a beautiful organized pantry.

Davids Toothpaste
Turns out, it is possible to have a non-plastic toothpaste tube—and this clean formula is also free of sodium lauryl sulfate.

EcoZoi Bamboo Kitchen Towels
With these, there’s zero need for plastic or paper cleaning supplies.

Jonathan Spoons Spootle
Hand-made, all-wood, and an inventive ladle-meets-spatula design.

Tallowderm Deodorant
Natural coconut oil and beef tallow make for a hardworking natural deodorant, all smartly housed in a glass jar.

Ambrosia Linen Vegetable Bag
These linen bags keep bacteria and mold at bay, extending the life of vegetables and eradicating any need for zip-plastic bags.

Flamingo Estate Douglas Fir & Vetiver Body Set
A blend of juniper, lavender, and vetiver infuses this set of body oil, body wash, and soap. We love how this company goes to great lengths to rid plastic and care for the earth.

If You Care Parchment Baking Paper
The ultimate option for baking and cooking that is chlorine- and plastic-free

Cocofloss Floss
We’ll say it: This is the best floss out there. Plus, the company reuses plastic in the most genius way.

Flavedo & Albedo Dew Tint
A clean blush, lip, and eye color housed in a plastic-free tin.

Stella McCartney Logo Large Tote Bag
Nichole loves this luxury tote, made of vegan leather. “It serves as a shopping bag, travel tote and carry-on, and it’s stylish year-round,” she says.

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Plastic Is Everywhere. These Founders Are Building a Beauty Company Without It

By Stacey Lindsay

Plastic is part of countless items we reach for, from our phones to our toothbrushes to our clothing. It's a fast, inexpensive, malleable resource to create, making it a go-to material for manufacturers worldwide. But just as plastic offers practicality, its widespread use and poor waste management have led to gigantic environmental challenges and personal consequences. More and more studies show how this forever material takes residence in our bodies, oceans, landfills, and air. Plastic is everywhere.

What is encouraging is to see innovative companies creating ways around a dependence on plastic. Case in point: Flavedo and Albedo. Founded by Aleks Allen, Emily Perrett, and Toby Norris, three creative and design agency alums, this Australian-based makeup company uses zero plastics in its packaging. It's a rare feat in this industry, given that the beauty industry is overflowing with products housed in plastics, most of which are not even recyclable. This fact concerned the founders, so much so that they had to create something different. "We wanted to reconcile our love of makeup and our concern around plastic packaging and landfill," Allen says. "It was one of those ideas that just wouldn't go away—so we decided it was the right time to build our own."

Talking Plastic-Free Makeup and Innovation with Aleks Allen

What concerns you most about the plastic in our lives today? And how does the cosmetics industry, specifically, contribute to plastic waste?

We love makeup but have always been freaked out by plastic and landfill. Every piece of plastic ever made is still on Earth somewhere, unless it's been burnt. That's a really confronting thought. 

Every year, the beauty industry produces at least 120 billion pieces of plastic packaging. Most of those—the pumps, custom bottles, lids, and palettes—aren't or can't be recycled. The US data says that 91 of those units aren't recycled, and Australia is not much better, at 85 percent. It just seems wrong that your eyeshadow palette should live 500 years longer than you do. 

So, the plastic problem is huge, and recycling plastic won't fix it. We have to stop the new plastic flooding the market every day, which means viable alternatives are needed.

For your company, what do you use in plastic's stead?

We use aluminum because it has the highest recycling rate of all materials, and the process itself is light on emissions. Where that doesn't work for the formula, we use small amounts of glass, with natural cork-lined lids to keep our highlighters airtight. Our secondary packaging is all FSC-certified card and printed with soy-based inks. We use paper tape and untreated boxes. There is zero plastic anywhere. No tubs, no lids, no seals, no nothing.

What are the challenges of creating a beauty brand using no plastic? And what are the joys?

Launching a business during COVID was by far the biggest challenge. Those shipping delays really kept us on edge. From a production POV, developing an airtight lid for our High Glow without using a PE liner for the lid was a pretty big manufacturing and design hurdle. We didn't want to change the mousse formulation, so we wound up using cork instead. Unexpected, but it looks good and does the job perfectly.

The joys are getting a packaging solve that works. And also, that it doesn't force a consumer compromise on aesthetic or product performance.  That's the most rewarding. 

How do you aim to rise above all the plastic clutter and capitalistic noise that is so loud today? 

We focus on what we can control. We built a sustainable business so that we can keep making plastic-free products, one at a time. We hope that this year, sustainability finally comes for beauty. The industry needs to become more aware of the role it plays in our global plastic problem. It really needs to have its "fast fashion—KeepCup year."

To learn more about Flavedo and Albedo, visit flavedoandalbedo.com,

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The Plastic-Free Pioneers Making It Easy to Create a Sustainable Kitchen

One of the longest-running missions we’ve been on at PrimaFoodie is to cut out the plastic in our homes, especially our kitchens. Continued research suggests that exposure to bisphenol A (BPA), a synthetic estrogen found in hard plastics, may cause certain cancers. Manufacturers have been producing plastics that are deemed “BPA-Free”, but research on the alternatives links them to similarly concerning health issues.

The workaround? We aim for glass and other non-plastic materials to store our leftovers, seeds, nuts, and any other food items. We’ve found that when you start in the kitchen, ridding plastic from other places in the home gets easier—and, thanks to these brilliant companies, even fun.

Package Free Shop

Since its opening in 2017, this Brooklyn-based online shop has helped to keep millions of pieces of trash out of landfills. Founded by Lauren Singer, the environmentalist known for the savvy blog, Trash Is for Tossers, Package Free Shop offers a range of non-plastic items from personal care to office supplies to pet grooming, all from independently owned brands aimed at reducing unnecessary packaging and waste. The site is a joy to peruse, and the kitchen section is abundant for its stainless steel containers, wood cutting boards, reusable straws, and the like.

Blisshaus

The Cadillac of pantry storage systems. Blisshaus, a collection of streamlined glass pantry jars and labels, is the brainchild of founder Wiebke Liu, a Germany-born, McKinsey-trained strategist with an intense passion for the intersection of efficiency and aesthetics. Liu created Blisshaus to be a multilevel option for creating a plastic-free kitchen. You can order their varied-sized jars to re-package your food items yourself. Or you can opt for their virtual or in-person kitchen makeover service, where a Blisshaus expert will walk you through the pantry organization process jar-by-jar.

Fillgood

More than a decade ago, Fillgood founder Stéphanie Regni took a class on recycling that changed the course of her life. She learned that the act of recycling, as well-intentioned as it is, is not a long-term solution for the copious amounts of plastics that end up in landfills. Her response to her realizations was founding Fillgood, an educational platform and online boutique that offers a range of plastic-free household items and refill options. The Fillgood kitchen section is an excellent resource for hard-to-find food storage staples like beeswax wrap, and welcomed discoveries including handmade dishwasher powder.

Honorable Mentions:

Zero Waste Store

The Refill Shoppe 

The Zero Market

Rethinking The Plastic In Our Lives

Some of the most promising shifts to promote a cleaner future have concerned the reduction of disposable plastics. We’ve seen a mineral water giant promise to switch to 100 percent recycled plastic by 2025. Airlines rid toss-able extras like straws, wrappers, and single-use utensils from their cabins. Beauty brands embrace the loop system and offer recyclable and compostable product refills. The changes have been huge and small, straightforward and inventive.

As encouraging as they are, these strides also beg the question: Why is there still so much single-use, toxic, ocean-choking plastic? It’s disarming—an insult, really—to order a product, only to find it wrapped in copious layers or contained in a throwaway plastic bottle.

This egregious waste inspired Tonia Soteros to open Recontained, a zero waste online and brick-and-mortar shop that offers bulk items and other alternatives to single-use plastic. Soteros was flipping through a book in the checkout line one day when she halted at this statistic: If every person in America stopped using body wash, it would save 2.5 million pounds of plastic entering the landfill every year. “I immediately became a bar soap girl,” she says. But what about all the other shampoos, cleaners, conditioners, and the like in her house? Soteros looked to see if there was a place that offered these solutions in bulk, allowing her to refill her empty containers rather than toss them. Unable to find one, she opened Recontained.

Soteros’s journey is a reminder of how huge the issue of disposable plastics is, which is why it needs to be tackled from every angle. The companies making the single-used plastics need to be held accountable, just as the businesses employing them do. The onus is also on us: We need to be vigilant in rethinking how we let single-use plastic into our lives. As Soteros helps us see, this can start with simple manageable steps.   

5 Ways to Reduce Disposable Plastic

Rethink the Bottle

For those looking for an easy way to begin their zero-waste journey, Soteros suggests eliminating the plastic water bottles—for good. “This is a simple, straightforward swap that can have a substantial impact,” she says. Invest in a reusable bottle and a water filter. And if you have a water delivery, she suggests finding one that delivers in glass instead of plastic.

 Bag Smartly

Even though some cities across the US have banned single-use plastic bags, these sneaky polluters are still out there in droves. Rid this practice and keep a few sustainable, reusable bags accessible. Soteros like the organic mesh bags. They work for most anything, including produce, and take up little room when not in use.

 Be Picky with Packaging

The grocery store is a huge culprit of excessive plastic, says Soteros, who points to the plastic mesh bags often used to contain fruits and vegetables. “Not only do these bags contribute to the plastic that ends up in the landfills, but they so often end up in the ocean where they cause severe damage and death to our precious marine life,” she says. Aim to buy produce that is unpackaged, or at least free of plastic. (This is an easy option at the farmers market.)

 Sweat the Small Stuff

We tend to be more aware of the throwaway water bottles, the single-use shopping bags, the old BPA-leaching food containers, but the tinier plastic culprits often lack our attention. “Once you start really paying attention, you will begin to see excessive plastic all around you,” says Soteros. Take note of the smaller plastic parts—i.e. bottle cap safety seals, personal care bottle caps, food takeout containers, lip balm tubes—and see if you can recycle them or find an alternative company that does without them in their packaging. TerraCycle offers a ZeroWaste box that makes recycling odd and overlooked items a breeze. 

 Communicate

A simple email or call can go a very long way. By reaching out to a company to voice your concern over their packaging, shipping practices, and other methods that incorporate disposable plastic, it can spark a helpful conversation. Oftentimes a company may be working toward reducing their plastic use but they haven’t communicated this to their customers. Or perhaps your call may entice them to shift their priorities. Honest communication can spark great change. 

To learn more about Soteros and Recontained, visit: recontained.com. And for more information on how to combat the issue of plastic waste, these organizations are creating incredible movements:

Alliance to End Plastic Waste

 Green Education Foundation

 Plastic Pollution Coalition

 The Story of Stuff Project

How to Keep Produce Fresh

I have been on a long mission to reduce food waste in our household. This is to save time and money, and to avoid adding to the gigantic problem that is wasted food in America. 

Research shows that fresh produce is among the top foods that are tossed. It makes sense, as keeping fruits and vegetables fresh can be a surprisingly tough mandate. How many times has a head of crisp lettuce quickly turned into a wilted pile in the fridge? In efforts to reduce this, I’ve created a system that makes it easier to keep fruits and vegetables fresher, longer. 

Refrigerator Storage 

Before jumping in, a quick word on storage: If you do have produce that is wilted and old, discard it before your farmers’ market or grocery run. This will keep bacteria and other compounds from spoiling your fresh produce faster. (You can read more on that in my guide to keeping a clean fridge.) A great way to save wilted produce is to place it in a pot of water with bones to make bone broth. (You can also store it in the freezer in a broth bag for when you’re ready to make broth.) Give the fruit and vegetable shelves and bins a quick wipe-down with vinegar and water. (I keep a small spray bottle of this solution under the sink.) This is all you need in between deeper refrigerator cleanings. 

Lettuce: Wash lettuce as soon as you get home from the farmer’s market. Unroll several feet of paper towel and place it on the counter. Cut off the base of the lettuce head. Put lettuce leaves in a salad spinner and fill with water so they are completely immersed, taking caution not to overcrowd. Use your hands to vigorously agitate the lettuce. If the water turns brown and gritty, dump it out and repeat the process until the water is clean. Once the lettuce is clean, dump out the water and energetically spin it dry. Place the lettuce on the paper towels in a single layer to air dry. Once dry, roll the lettuce in the paper towels and place the wrapped lettuce in a sealed reusable bag (pushing ALL of the air out before sealing) and store in the fridge. This will double—or even triple—the shelf life of your lettuce. It will also be ready to eat, making salad preparation that much easier. This applies to all lettuces except tender greens like arugula and baby spinach, which have a shorter shelf life and should be eaten within a few days of buying them. 

Carrots: If you put carrots directly in your crisper, they’ll be limp by the end of the week. Instead, cut off carrot tops and discard or save for reuse. (I love to put them in a food processor and add to pesto, chimichurri, tabouli salad, or broths.) Submerge carrots in water in a large, flat, high-sided glass container and store in the fridge. If they are too long, you can cut or break them in half. This will generally keep carrots fresh for longer than a month. Change the water every so often to keep it fresh and clear. This method also works well for parsnips and radishes.

Broccoli: Airflow is important to keep broccoli fresh. Before storing in the fridge, you can slice off the end and store stem down in a jar of water, like a broccoli bouquet, or wrap the stem in a damp paper towel. Don’t wash broccoli until you are ready to eat it.

Asparagus, Celery, and Other Cruciferous Vegetables: These can be stored like broccoli in water. Cut an inch off the bottom first. Celery also lasts if stored in a sealed bag. Cauliflower can be stored in a ventilated bag in the fridge, or loose if you don’t have one. Brussels sprouts and cabbage keep in sealed bags in the fridge, ideally in the crisper. 

Squash: Store zucchini and summer squash loose in the crisper. Large winter squash, like pumpkin and butternut squash, are best stored on a countertop or in a pantry.

Potatoes and Onions: These should be stored outside of the fridge in a cool, dry, dark place. 

Mushrooms: Store in a paper bag in the fridge door. Keep the natural dirt on the surface until right before you cook or eat them.

Herbs: Different herbs require different storage techniques. Leafy herbs like basil should be stored upright in a glass of water, like a bouquet of flowers, at room temperature. Tender herbs like parsley and cilantro can also be stored this way. Be sure to change the water every couple of days. Hardier herbs like rosemary and thyme can be wrapped in a damp paper towel and stored in a bag in the fridge. (For long-term storage, put the bag in the freezer.) You can also make herb-olive oil ice cubes: Portion out washed, de-stemmed and chopped herbs into ice-cube trays, fill the trays with olive oil and freeze. 

Berries: Store unwashed berries in the fridge in a paper towel-lined glass container with a lid. Berries last longer, especially soft ones like raspberries, if they are stored in a single layer so a large/wide, low-sided container is best.

Tomatoes: Store this fruit separately at room temperature. Refrigeration will make tomatoes mealy.

Other Fruits: Ethylene-producing fruits, like apples, avocados, and bananas, should be stored separately from other produce. They cause other produce to ripen and decay faster and will cause potatoes to sprout. 

Once you get into a rhythm of honoring what a specific fruit or vegetable needs, keeping them fresh becomes an easy habit. To ensure you eat through all of your food, keep the newest on the bottom or in the back so the oldest is most accessible. And always aim to keep anything in glass over plastic containers. There inevitably may be some foods that end up needing to be tossed,  but taking this in stride, and making even small reductions in waste, can lead to a huge difference. 

Containers

Avoid plastic and invest in glass whenever possible. Plastic is toxic and leaches into food, and it pollutes our earth and ocean. The National Ocean Service estimates that eight million tons of plastic enter the ocean every year. The glass container will last longer than the lid, so I recommend buying from a brand that sells replacement lids, like Pyrex, Anchorage, or Snapware. Lids will last longer if you wash by hand, or don’t use the dry cycle on the dishwasher. 

It’s recommended to keep eggs at the top where the temperature is most consistent and milk on the bottom in the back of the fridge where it is coldest. If something starts to go bad, remove it immediately so it doesn’t contaminate the rest of your food.