Could You Fit Two Years’ Worth of Trash in a Tiny Container?

Lauren Singer is on a mission.
The spunky 23-year-old has spent the last two years living a Zero Waste (ZW) life. Singer is so good at it that all of the trash she’s created since then fits in a 16-ounce Mason jar. That’s right: two years of garbage in one jar.
In her amusing and inspiring blog, entitled trash is for tossers, Singer documents her ZW lifestyle and explains why it all started in the first place. As an environmental studies major at NYU, she watched one of her schoolmates bring lunch to class every week, contained in an undue amount of disposable packaging. This weekly ritual induced the sentiment that millennials are the earth’s future and “…here we are with our trash, messing it up.”
According to Duke University’s Center for Sustainability and Commerce, the average American produces 4.3 pounds of waste everyday. That’s more than two and a half times what it was in the 1960s. What’s worse is that approximately two-thirds of this trash could be composted rather than sent to the thousands of overloaded landfills in this country.
In an interview Singer recently did with New York magazine, she said one of the top three things you can do to reduce waste is “…[t]ransition out purchased products and learn to make things yourself.” (Apparently, producing your own toothpaste is one of the easiest ways to make a fresh start.) Which is why Singer is progressing from micro to macro by founding The Simply Co., a company that makes homemade, environmentally-friendly laundry detergent. It was so successful on Kickstarter, The Simply Co. met their target of $10,000 in just 48 hours — and then went on to yield four times that.
Singer explains the fillip to this endeavor in her compelling video: “There are over 85,000 industrial chemicals out there and the majority of ones that are in use today have never even been tested for safety. In fact, cleaning product manufacturers aren’t even legally required to list their ingredients on their packaging. So we really have no clue what’s in them.”
In contrast, The Simply Co. uses only three ingredients in its laundry detergent: baking soda, washing soda and castile soap. If you’re feeling crazy, you can go for the scented version with a fourth ingredient, deriving its lavender fragrance from organic essential oils.
So, for those of us who don’t have time for or are intimidated by the prospect of making our own cleaning products and feel guilty about being part of the problem, think about buying this planet-loving merchandise – but you’ll have to get in line because it’s already sold out.
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Which Common Product Should You Wash Out of Your Laundry Room?

Go down the laundry aisle at your local supermarket and bottle after bottle of detergent will evoke images of open fields, spring flowers or even a tropical fruit fiesta. Despite the lovely pictures, we all know there’s really nothing natural about these chemically-ridden liquids and powders.
The scary part is that cleaning products are not legally required to list their ingredients, so there’s no exact way to find out what’s being used on our clothing or what’s being washed into the waterways. However, we do know that there are a slew of chemicals in detergent that are as toxic as they are difficult to pronounce.
The Environmental Protection Agency found that ingredients in bleach, such as sodium hypochlorite, dichloro-isocyanurate and nitrogen-trichloride, “can form hazardous gases” and “may form toxic gas” and is “a threat to human health,” respectively. The agency also found that alkylphenol ethoxylates, the chemical found in fabric softener, has “high toxicity to aquatic organisms, and may be endocrine disruptors (compounds that adversely affect the endocrine system that controls metabolism, reproduction, and growth).”
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It’s completely unnecessary for these harmful chemicals to be a part of our laundry routine, especially since there are plenty of eco-friendly detergents on the market.
And if you have the time, you can even make it yourself. DIY laundry detergent only requires three ingredients: washing soda, borax and bar soap. This blog post from The Simple Dollar breaks down the process step by step; it explains that the homemade soap removes stains just as effectively as name-brand detergents and saves money as well.
“Using my homemade stuff, I spend $8.15 for the detergent over the course of the year,” the author explains. “Using Tide with Bleach Alternative, I spend $73.23 over the course of a year. Using my homemade detergent instead saves me $65.08 a year. Plus, it was fun to make.”
TreeHugger recently featured zero-waste blogger Lauren Singer of Trash is for Tossers, who just started her own company, The Simply Co. and a Kickstarter campaign to make her three-ingredient, handmade, organic and vegan laundry powder available to the masses.
“There are over 85,000 industrial chemicals out there and the majority of ones that are in use today have never even been tested for safety,” Singer says in the video below. “In fact, cleaning product manufacturers aren’t even legally required to list their ingredients on their packaging, so we really have no clue what’s in them.”
So while it’s important to have clean clothes, for the sake of our health and the planet’s health, let’s all try to wash them more responsibly.
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