Five Green Bathroom Accessories You Need
August 19, 2009 by Jennifer Chait
Filed under Green Living
There are tons of ways to green your bathroom, but there are absolutely some easy ways to go about it, starting with these five items:
A real water cup: Those flimsy little paper cups add up in a big way, both in your trash and with their impact (materials and energy used to make them). Use real cup, use the lid of your mouthwash, carry your reusable water bottle into the bathroom with you, or walk to the kitchen for a drink.
Recycled toilet paper: Seventh Generation notes that if everyone replaced one 12 pack of normal toilet paper with one 12 pack of recycled toilet paper we’d save about 1.3 billion gallons of water a year. Marcal, another recycled toilet paper manufacturer saves over 200,000 tons of paper (that might end up in landfills) by turning this paper into recycled toilet paper and other home paper products.
Refillable soap dispenser: A refillable soap pump is a must have. There are tons of problems with buying new plastic soap dispensers over and over. It costs more, you can’t recycle all the parts, and manufacturing these pumps is a waste of resources too.
A recycled toothbrush: One toothbrush in a landfill may not seem like much, but imagine what the pile looks like with just your city’s toothbrushes, now what about the whole world? That’s a whole lot of toothbrushes. Preserve makes recycled toothbrushes that can be recycled again after you use them.
A non-toxic shower curtain: Shower curtains and liners made of plastic contain PVC, a harmful chemical, plus to make matters worse hardly any PVC is recycled. You can buy PVC, eco-friendly shower curtains many places now.
[image via stock.xchng]
Espresso cups or small jam jars make excellent bathroom cups. Speaking of real bathroom cups, I recently started storing mine inside the medicine cabinet after catching Choco licking the inside of it. Eww. He likes the taste of my mouthwash.
That’s a good point – see this is why I miss you at THF, because you apply animal logic to green issues. If you have a pet a small jam jar rocks because you could cover it after use. Or if you’re a germ freak and don’t like that toilets spray out (in theory) a cover is good too.