The bathroom is a medium-threat room: less heat-plus-food than the kitchen, but it’s a parade of single-use plastic touching your body daily, plus a few sneaky polymer ingredients in the products themselves. The strategy here is pure attrition: use up what you own, then replace each thing once, permanently.
The free moves
- Stop buying liquid-in-plastic by default. Most bathroom liquids are mostly water you’re paying to ship inside plastic.
- Scan ingredient lists for polyethylene, polypropylene, acrylates copolymer, and “PEG-” prefixes in leave-on products — legal polymer additives that ride down the drain and onto your skin.
- Ditch the plastic loofah/pouf when it wears out — it’s a microfiber shedder living in hot water. A cotton washcloth was always fine.
Under $50
- Shampoo & conditioner bars — one bar outlasts 2–3 bottles, travels without TSA drama, zero bottle waste.
- Bamboo toothbrushes — modest exposure win, easy zero-waste win; your dentist cares about the bristles, not the handle.
- Bar soap over body wash — the original plastic-free product. Never left.
Worth the investment
- A metal razor — cartridge razors are a subscription to plastic; a metal razor is a one-time purchase with blades that cost pennies. The pivoting-head models removed the learning curve.
What you can ignore
Your existing towels, the shower curtain you already own (replace with fabric when it dies), and anything marketed as a “detox.” Skin is a good barrier; the bathroom’s plastic problem is mostly a waste-stream and habit problem, not an acute exposure one. That’s why it’s week four, not week one.
