Posted on by Hoef_Inge

Avoid plastic and chemical waste with bubbles

On Ya we live fossil free. While Peter is working on the batteries, Inge experiments with bubbles to avoid plastics and chemical waste.

One of the experiments: tooth paste! Inge uses baking soda instead of tooth paste. This saves plastic, all kinds of unnessecary additions and a big CO2 emission on making the tooth paste.

Before these experiments, in October we checked our sunscreens. Fortunately, none of them contained Oxybenzone. But we did have bottles containing Octocrylene. Once you know what it is, you don’t want to use it anymore.

The bottles with Octocrylene went into the garbage. 

Now it is time to check our other cosmetics and detergents. 

It is hard to get environmentally friendly detergents in some places.

The warning signs on the back of the bottles tell the story in any language. 
Obviously, you would want to avoid the ‘skull-and-bones’ and ‘dead-tree-dead-fish’ symbols. Also, the exclamation mark seems worth avoiding. That is, if the icons appear because for some categories it is not mandatory to show the label.

So, what could help? We did an experiment using baking soda. The can we had on board was quite old but still reacted with vinegar (bubbles), so, it would still work.

In these pictures you see how baking soda, vinegar, patience and some extra effort turned the black inside of Inge’s teacup amazingly white. But don’t use it on aluminium, silver, gold, or marble!

Encouraged, we passed on to toothpaste. We buy the ones that do not contain microbeads, but we wondered if we could also avoid using plastic tubes. Baking soda is supposed to work so we tried it. It is really nice how clean it leaves your teeth (see video above)

If you don’t like the salty taste or want to have an added taste like peppermint you can just search for plastic free tooth paste tablets and you will find several sites that provide them.

Deodorant, really?

Baking soda appears to have magic qualities. Would it also work as a deodorant? Inge only likes one specific brand and that is not widely available. So, that was also worth a try. A really easy recipe for deodorant: 1:3 baking soda and coconut oil. Melt, mix and allow some time for cooling down. Use sparingly.

Test results: it smells slightly like coconut, does not irritate the armpits and it stood the odour test of a nice walk in the Spanish sun. 

If we replace our toothpaste, deodorant and detergents for the baking soda alternative this will save us at least 4 tubes of toothpaste, 2 deodorants and 2 bottles of detergent per year. Less chemical waste, less plastic, just as clean and fresh, more space on the boat and in addition, some savings. Not bad!