Wipe out the wet wipes and get back to soap and water
YOU don’t have to glue your seminaked self to glass in the Houses of Parliament to express your environmental concerns – as protesters did recently.
All you have to do is stop buying all the silly products companies foist upon us. You’ll not only help save the planet – but a pretty penny, too.
Multinational companies want us to buy as much stuff as possible.
And so they invent and heavily market more and more things we don’t actually need.
George Clooney may regard himself as a right-on liberal but he is not doing the planet any favours by trying to flog us those annoying plastic-intense coffee pods.
They cost more, taste worse in my opinion and produce organic waste encased in plastic – the worst type of product for disposing of. What was wrong with the glass plunger pot that served us so well for centuries?
A growing number of cleaning products are also noncompostable throwaways – like the wet wipes for floors, faces and work surfaces.
What on earth is wrong with reusable mops, cloths or soap, (now in danger of becoming extinct along with half the animals on the planet)?
Wipes, inset, are a costly bit of chemically infused waste that’s unsuitable for the green or brown bin.
Made of polyester, which can take hundreds of years to decompose, they pollute seas and clog drains. Experts say wipes may actually be driving antibiotic resistance.
Environmentalist Donnachadh McCarthy, of the 3 Acorns ecoconsultancy, said: ‘In hospitals, it’s important to have clinical levels of cleanliness but in the home, using antibacterial products is usually unnecessary and is actually dangerous to future human health.’
Reuseable cloths are much cheaper – and cheaper still if you stick them in the washing machine when dirty and use them again. To keep them clean for longer, dry them by hanging them up and don’t leave them languishing in dirty water at the bottom of the sink. Dermatologists don’t like face wipes either. ‘They contain surfactants, detergent-like chemicals which dissolve make-up and grime,’ says cosmetic dermatologist Dr Sam Bunting. ‘If these are too harsh, they will irritate the skin.’ Even baby wipes are not as pure as they seem. One type of WaterWipes contains 99.9% water and 0.1% grapefruit seed extract. But the wipes themselves can be 80% polyester, which if flushed can block drains,
introduce plastic to the food chain and won’t break down in landfill for centuries.
Another product that really gets me into a lather is shower gel. It is expensive, packed full of man-made chemicals, difficult to use and wasteful.
And yet, thanks to the persuasive power of marketing, bottles of it sit proudly in almost every bathroom in the land.
Today, more than eight out of 10 people wash themselves with gels costing up to a fiver a bottle. Most of the bottles don’t stand upright or they leak when hanging from their plastic hooks. They are difficult to open, easy to spill and hard to apply. Much of the gel squirted into the user’s hands slides to the floor to be washed down the drain (thereby increasing the makers’ profits).
There are at least 100 brands of shower gel on sale in supermarkets, each with its own name, ingredients and unique smell, usually mimicking some type of increasingly exotic (or ridiculous) food combos.
Why on earth would anyone want to slather themselves in something made of Camelia and almonds, grapefruit and mint – or hibiscus and white sage?
Many toiletries come in plastic bottles which take energy to manufacture and can end up in landfill or in the ocean.
What’s wrong with a good old fashioned and far cheaper bar of soap?
A typical bottle of shower gel will yield about 29 washes – around the same as a bar of soap.
However, the soap bar costs 27c compared to €3.50 for shower gel from the same manufacturer I checked in one supermarket.
But guess which one most marketing efforts will be aimed at making us buy?
The one that costs over 10 times more and presumably boost profits by the same amount, regardless of the cost to the environment.