Celebrating Earth Day with Five Eco Friendly Products

Here at Patience & Pearls, we are celebrating Earth Day with five eco friendly products that are easy options to introduce your household to a sustainable lifestyle. While we try to be very careful with certain things, like minimizing water usage, driving vehicles that get great gas mileage and purchasing a lot of our furniture and clothing secondhand, we realize that there is always room for improvement. These products are just small, easy ways to reduce, reuse and recycle and make a difference in our environment.

1. Dropps Laundry Pods – Recycle

These laundry pods come in a recyclable and compostable box. They are dye-free, phthalate-free, phosphate-free and animal cruelty-free. Dropps also sells dishwasher detergent and oxi-booster. The laundry pods are about $0.42/load, which is a little bit higher than other laundry pod brands, but if being environmentally friendly is important to you, this might be a worthwhile purchase

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2. Bee’s Wrap – Reuse

This reusable food wrap is made from cotton and beeswax, and can be reused for up to one year. Not only is this saving the environment from unnecessary plastic waste, the consumer saves by not having to buy plastic wrap over and over again. Though there are cheaper beeswax wrap competitors, Bee’s Wrap is a women-owned Certified B Corp and is Green America certified. Additionally, the cotton used in the wrap is GOTS-certified organic and the beeswax is sustainably harvested. You can use these wraps to cover your leftovers or wrap your lunch in, and they clean easily with a little bit of soap and cold water.

3. Grove Collaborative Reusable Produce Bags – Reduce

Do you ever go to the grocery store and think of how unnecessary it is to use a plastic bag for each type of fruit and vegetable that you pick up? At our house, we make every effort to save those plastic bags and reuse them as trash bags, but it still feels wasteful. Here in Chicago, we have a bag tax (among several other unwanted taxes) to help encourage consumers to bring their own reusable tote bags to carry away their groceries in, but I still find myself using those little plastic vegetable bags. Grove Collaborative has these organic cotton mesh produce bags in a set of six that come in small, medium and large sizes to accommodate all of your produce needs. Just throw them in your bag as you head out to the grocery store and brilliantly illustrate the principle of reducing waste.

4. Grove Collaborative Bubble Up Dish Brush Set – Reduce/Reuse

Dish sponges are great and easy to use, but most of them end up being used briefly and thrown into the trash. This dish brush set is easy to use, and use, and use. The soap dish that comes with the brush doubles as a dish soap dispenser so that your dish brush is ready to scrub your dishes clean. The dish brush set that is linked has a special design to celebrate Earth Day as well!

5. Reusable BPA-Free Food Storage Bags – Reduce/Reuse

I love that these exist! Now we can stop buying those food storage bags that we end up throwing away after each use. Even if you wash them, the grocery store plastic bags are flimsy and are not durable enough for repeated use. These reusable storage bags are BPA-free and made from PEVA material, which is more durable than plastic. As a bonus, these bags are also sturdy enough to be used as freezer bags. With these bags, we can reduce consumption of plastic items and reuse our bags. 

Those were my top five eco-friendly products to help us celebrate Earth Day. Although Earth Day is one day, we can be conscious of our environment every day of the year. For more eco-friendly products, check out the links below!