Zero Waste Tips

Where the Avocado mattress sale calendar stands now, the year-round discount pattern, a Labor Day 2026 preview, and whether their promo codes are worth waiting for.

Every bar soap household accumulates them: slivers too thin to hold, stubs that slip down the drain, the sad pile in the shower corner. When someone asked r/ZeroWaste what to do with soap bits, five hundred people answered, which suggests the pile is universal. Six ways to use every last gram, starting with the laziest. … Read more

Recycled polyester is the workhorse claim of sustainable fashion: the swing tag says the jacket used to be water bottles, and the implication is that buying it helps. The truth is split down the middle. Compared to virgin polyester, recycled wins clearly. Compared to what the marketing implies, it falls short in two specific ways … Read more

On r/BuyItForLife, people post crockpots from 1997 and alarm clocks turning fifty, and the lesson under every photo is the same: the most sustainable product is the one you never replace. Durability is zero waste wearing work clothes. These are the buy-once items we recommend across the site, gathered in one place, with the math … Read more

Some of the most popular eco swaps quietly make things worse, and the zero waste community knows it: when r/sustainability asked which green trends do more harm than good, the thread filled with the same five answers. We agree with most of them. What follows is the case against each, and the cheaper move that … Read more

Ziploc bags sat quietly in the safe pile for decades. Then in April 2025 a class action landed on S.C. Johnson alleging the “microwave safe” and freezer labels mislead customers, because polyethylene bags shed microplastics under exactly those conditions. Rubbermaid’s parent company caught a similar suit. So are the bags in your drawer a problem? … Read more

Bottled water sells on purity, which is what makes the research so uncomfortable. When Columbia University researchers counted the plastic in bottled water with new laser imaging in 2024, they found an average of around 240,000 plastic fragments per liter, most of them nanoplastics small enough to pass into tissue. Earlier work had already found … Read more

Pinterest is full of three-ingredient laundry detergent recipes: grated castile soap, borax, washing soda, pennies per load. We are a zero waste site, so you might expect us to cheer. We can’t, because the chemistry doesn’t cooperate. Homemade laundry detergent is almost always homemade laundry soap, and soap behaves badly inside a washing machine. This … Read more

Blueland and Branch Basics sit at the top of nearly every non-toxic cleaning list, including ours. They solve the same problem with opposite philosophies, and the right pick depends more on your household than on either brand. We reviewed both separately (Blueland here, Branch Basics here); this is the head-to-head. Affiliate disclosure: We may earn … Read more

Disposable razors are one of the most wasteful items in the bathroom: a few weeks of use, then plastic handle, rubber grip, and cartridge all go to landfill, forever. A metal safety razor fixes the whole category. The handle lasts decades, replacement blades cost pennies, and the shave is closer once you learn the technique. … Read more