Plastic-Free Cleaning

Cleaning tools are a blind spot: we think about what we're cleaning, not what we're cleaning with. But most cleaning tools are plastic, and a cleaning tool is designed to wear away as you use it - which means that wear is microplastic. A foam sponge and a scour pad clean by abrasion, shedding fragments and fibers into the wash water and onto the surfaces you just cleaned with every pass; a "magic eraser" cleans by visibly disintegrating into plastic particles. A brush hides the same problem in plain sight - the handle may be wood, but the bristles that do the work are usually nylon, and they shed just like foam as they scrub. Between them that's a conventional sponge (polyurethane foam), a green scour pad (polyester or nylon), a magic eraser (melamine foam), and most "wooden" dish brushes (nylon bristles) - none of which compost or really recycle, all in direct, repeated contact with the dishes you eat off.

The good news is that this is one of the cheapest and most complete swaps available: natural cellulose, loofah, and coconut coir cover the sponges and scours, while sisal, tampico, palm, or coir bristles cover the brushes - the same jobs, about the same price, compostable at the end. We break cleaning down by tool type, because the material question is a little different for a soft sponge, a stiff scour, and a handled brush.