Plastic-free July: Day 7

I didn’t buy anything involving single-use plastic today, probably because I didn’t buy anything at all except a couple of coffees in G&Ds (served in real mugs). Lunch was at Brown’s, so it was all real crockery/cutlery (though of course I have no idea how much single-use plastic a restaurant gets through in a day…) and, even better, it was paid for by somebody else. :-)

So instead of itemising things I’ll tell you about our lower-plastic cleaning stuff: we get our washing-up liquid, laundry liquid and toilet cleaner from Splosh. How it works is:

  1. You buy a plastic bottle and a sachet of concentrated cleaning stuff
  2. You stick the sachet in the bottle & add hot water.
  3. The sachet dissolves & the concentrated cleaning stuff gets diluted to the right consistency
  4. You use your cleaning stuff as normal
  5. When you need more, you order more sachets with which to refill your plastic bottle
  6. The sachets are small enough to go through the letterbox (in their cardboard packaging) so you don’t even need to be in when they’re delivered

They do a reasonable range of cleaning stuff (laundry liquid, fabric conditioner, washing-up liquid, kitchen cleaner, bathroom cleaner, floor cleaner, toilet cleaner, and hand wash) in nice fruity/flowery scents, and it seems to be as effective as anything else. The washing-up liquid isn’t quite as strong as some that you can buy (think Ecover rather than concentrated Fairy Liquid), but the laundry liquid has been absolutely fine and at £5.95 including postage for 2 x 1l bottle I think it works out comparatively cheap (though it’s hard to compare different sizes/strengths and I haven’t done the sums in detail).

If you think this sounds like a good idea & you want to try it out, you can get £5 off your first starter box by using this code: 715793 (I get £1 as well for the first 5 who use the code).

Of course this isn’t the only way to do refills for cleaning liquids: SESI sell cleaning stuff (they advised me that it’s easier if you bring a bottle with the capacity marked on it, but if you use other bottles then they can still measure quantities out for you) and the Windmill Shop in Headington do refills of Ecover — but I’ve never tried either of these myself, and there may well be others I don’t know about, so please follow up with more info in the comments if you’ve tried these or other options!