My Eco changes of 2021 and wishes for 2022

For the past couple of years I have been sharing my yearly eco changes. Here is last year’s eco changes of 2020. I am no where near a know it all when it comes to sustainability however one thing I have learnt over the years is to take small steps. Any change towards a more sustainable, reusable life is a benefit. 2021 wasn’t as productive as I had hoped it would be. There had been a lot of personal challenges and things happening which meant I didn’t have as much focus on sustainability, limiting my Eco Changes. However, I am pleased that I continued with some elements and 2022 brings a fresh new year and perspective.

Eco Changes of 2021

Bathroom

Last year we switched our toilet roll to BoxRoll, a plastic free, UK manufactured toilet roll. We have continued to use this throughout 2021, only resorting to supermarket rolls on the occasional time we have run out.

I have been trying to minimise the bottles that I buy and use too. Shower Gel, Shampoo and Conditioner. It’s great to find brands who are creating recyclable bottles using recycled plastics, as that is the whole point of using reusable isn’t it? I have been using solid bars, however every now and again there has been the occasional bottle too.

This year I also switched the boys to an electric toothbrush, one where we only need to change the heads rather than the whole brush. Now I just need to find a sustainable way of buying heads.

Kitchen

There hasn’t been much of a change in the kitchen. I am still buying food in bulk and trying to minimize my day to day plastics. It was either last year or the year before I mentioned I wanted to buy a reusable bin liner, this is the year I do that. I did ditch bin liners for our recycling bin, opting to put our recycling straight into the big bin. However, I was thinking of buying 2 reusable liners for our kitchen bin, one for our general waste and the other as a spare to line the bin when the other gets dirty.

One of the other things I want to try and do and is shop more at refill places. I think this will heavily reduce packaging, I just need to tally up costs, as I know this is generally more expensive, although the general quality of the loose food is better, hence tallying it all up!

Personal

I think I am on year 4 of using reusable period products. I do however need a more sustainable bathroom sponge/loofah thing. What I am currently using isn’t really cutting it, I don’t like the natural loofahs and I find the material ones just deteriorate. So that I suppose will be something I try and get this year, something a little more lasting. I have been toying up with buying a soap bag, to put a bar of soap into, you can lather this up and use that. So maybe I’ll give that a try first.

I am wanting to focus on losing weight so that means I will hopefully need to be buying new clothes. I am planning on making use of charity shops and finding some second hand clothes instead of buying new! At least this way I won’t be adding to the problem of fast fashion. And then when I grow out of them by hopefully losing lots and lots of weight I can then re-donate.

There isn’t too many changes that have happened this year, but I have continued with alot of previous changes that I introduced last year! Which is always a winner.