Emma Tries Environmental

Smol Dishwasher Tablets: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ About Smol: Smol was set up to provide eco friendly cleaning products which are delivered straight to you. They provide (most products) in plastic free, recyclable packaging, which is the main reason I trialled these. The dishwashing tablets are all-in-one so that you shouldn't need to buy salt or rinse-aid. Additionally, all their products are cruelty free and come with a child-lock mechanism.  Setting up your orders is really easy. They ask you how many times you run the dishwasher a week, and from that calculate how often to send you your delivery. And you don't even have to pay for postage! My Swap: This is how my last two types of dishwashing tablets compare to Smol's in price and packaging: The first came in 25g of recyclable plastic, using about 125g of plastic a year. They cost £15 for 81 tablets, 19p per tablet. The second came in 140g of plastic packaging, with no instructions on recycling. This totals about 500g of plastic a year. Th

Bar Hand Soap: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ This is the first of my quick fix reviews. These are all 5-star alternatives that are easy to incorporate into everyday life. Bar soap is a product that already features in lots of homes, and for good reason! Although there may not be lots to say about the humble hand soap, there is a lot to say for the affects that switching to bar soap has. Why is this swap necessary? This product that removes much unnecessary packaging. Bar soap makes bottles used for liquid soap redundant, as pointless as plastic bags for bananas. It was estimated that 577 million soap containers entered the environment last year. [1]  This is all avoidable plastic packaging which is easily replaced by the cardboard boxes or paper wraps that bar soap comes in. The liquid hand soap that I used before was roughly 55g of mostly unrecyclable plastic. That is about 2.5kg of plastic my house saves a year by switching to bars. This multiplied across the whole population makes a massive difference.

Reusable Period Pads: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ / ⭐⭐⭐ Why is this swap necessary? The average woman over her lifetime will use 11,000 tampons. These plastic applicators are equivalent to 5,500 plastic bags, and period pads use just as much plastic as the applicators. 90% of period pads are plastic, and given that 50% of the population will have a period for the majority of their lives this represents a vast, vast amount. Based on women making up half of the UK’s population (34,084,000 women), this is 187,462,000,000 plastic bags. Considering most of us are refusing to buy plastic bags anymore, this is a crazy amount. Luckily, there are more and more alternatives appearing in the market. From reusable period pads to menstrual cups, reusable pants to applicator free tampons… the list goes on. I was initially a bit sceptical about reusable period products. They should be reliable and comfortable, and a lot of people I talk to share some of these doubts. As someone said to me, “If there is one place you