Originally posted on Skoy Enterprises LinkedIn.
Living sustainably shouldn’t have to be a choice based on what your income is. Period. Are there expensive ways to live sustainability? Yes! Are there expensive ways to kill the planet everyday? Don’t even get us started.
There is unquestionably a way to live a sustainable life while on a budget. Let’s even argue for a second the possibility that living with the environment in mind will help your wallet rather than run it dry.
Focusing on clean cleaning products alone, making the switch not only makes your life easier but will cost you a lot less over time.
Single-use plastics like hand soap and dish soap containers are soon to be a thing of the past. Most dish soaps and hand soaps are primarily water. Why pay for a company to add something that comes out of your kitchen sink? Using a glass or metal container with dissolvable solvents not only makes more common sense, but is also a sustainable way to save money.
From the eco-conscious company, Grove Collaborative, you can buy a foaming soap concentrate for $5.95 that will fill up your hand soap 3x (and it comes in plastic-free packaging). Most hand soaps on Grove Collaborative run for about $3.90 per plastic bottle. In comparison, that’s nearly $2 savings on each bottle of hand soap. Not over time—every time.
European dishcloths are certainly not new. They’ve been widely used in Europe since they were invented in 1949 by Swedish engineer, Curt Lindquist. But now (finally!) they are gaining some traction in the United States.
When we started Skoy back in 2007, we aimed to create a household staple that was sustainable and affordable on any budget. Before Skoy, we knew that so many of the classic household cleaning products that were in any home simply were outdated and not cutting it.
Our take on the European dishcloth, the Skoy Cloth, replaces paper towels, sponges, rags, dishrags, and more in your home. Just one Skoy Cloth does the work of fifteen paper towel rolls. Pop a Skoy Cloth in the dishwasher when it gets a little dirty and it will come out cleaner than the dishes it ran with.
Let’s do the math: the average paper towel roll is about $2. The average American family goes through two paper towel rolls per week. A Skoy Cloth costs just about $2. One Skoy Cloth can last 8 weeks. Switching from paper towels to Skoy Cloths would save the average home $195 a year.
And after the 8 weeks that one Skoy Cloth lasts? They are completely, 100% biodegradable.
Before plastic wrap, there was beeswax wrap. Having been used since the early 1900s to cover jars, beeswax wrap was somehow overtaken by its wasteful competitor plastic wrap. But it’s certainly started to make a comeback in recent years with many eco-conscious companies leading the charge for the smarter way to keep food fresh.
Where one package of plastic wrap costs an average of $3 and is likely to only last a few weeks, the brand Cultical sells a 6 pack of 3 different sized beeswax wraps for just $15.99 that can be washed and reused dozens of times.
When you step back and look at the facts, living sustainability is without a doubt cheaper than not. Without the excuse of prices being too high, what are we left with? Inconvenience? Is inconvenience a good enough reason to continue to use products that are directly harming our planet?
The options for living a life that is less harmful to our planet are out there. It’s up to us to choose them.