Trying to become more sustainable in the kitchen? Start with the dish soap you use everyday! Commonly available dish soaps are often made with harsh chemicals and artificial fragrances that can cause harm to water systems and aquatic life, and nearly always come packaged in plastic. A great alternative to this would be a probiotic soap. Probiotics are healthy bacteria that not only keep your sponges fresh and odour-free, they also actively reduce the toxicity of drain water. A good probiotic dish soap can thoroughly clean your dishes while being gentle on your hands.
Traditionally, Indian kitchens made use of coconut coir to clean utensils everyday. Eventually, plastic scrubs and sponges took over, and their easy availability established their place in the modern Indian kitchen. However, these introduce harmful microplastics into the drains, while the sponges themselves end up in landfills for hundreds of years. Our coconut coir Dishwashing Scrubs embrace traditional materials and we love how little we miss the plastic sponges. Not only do the fibres do a great job of removing grease and grime, the coir is also quite soft, doesn’t harm your skin, and scratches utensils far lesser than their plastic/steel counterparts. At the end of its life they are fully compostable, and do not harm the planet at all.
It’s the year 2020, and if anybody is still using plastic bags at the grocery store, we’re looking at you with a stern face of disapproval. As the impact of using single-use plastics has become common knowledge, plastic bags have been banned in many places, including India. However, supermarkets still use plastic bags to pack fruits and vegetables separately before placing them in your cloth bags. Smaller stores and street vendors still use plastic bags on a daily basis. Carrying an extra cloth bag in your car/backpack/handbag is a habit we cannot recommend highly enough. Get yourself some veggie bags, so you can shop your fruits and vegetables separately in each bag and store them directly in your refrigerator!
