5 Eco-Friendly Product Swaps to Make Your Home More Earth-Happy

Happy Mother’s Day to our juicy, exhausted orb. We celebrate your bounty, stand in awe of your HD iguana versus snake fights (IYKYK), and stress out about how soon we might be living in a shittier version of Waterworld. We humbly come to you with an offering of sustainable products, including mattresses, and single-use plastic eradicaters and more, to start making all of this [points to Gowanus Canal] a little better.

We’re not here to take you on a lyrical doom scroll on this most resplendent Earth Day. The pandemic has already exacerbated our sense of mental stability, made its own environmental mess, and made us reconsider what exactly what practices we can feasibly do to live better within our communities, whether that means using less plastic, creating less overall waste, or learning how to protect our neighbors and ourselves in a food system with racial and socioeconomic inequalities. Maybe tomorrow we’ll wake up as a less optimistic flavor of concerned, but today we’re a scoop of Hallmark Channel-hopeful that we can all make better choices for less Trash Planet living. 

Easier said than done. But think of it like this: Look around your room, and consider your routines. What could you sub for some sustainable products? A mattress? Plastic bottles? Cleaning products? The good news is, if you can bust through the green-washing of it all, there’s a more eco-friendly version of everything from wax paper to vibrators on the market. 

Whether you've decided to make the adulting leap to being a Person With an Actual Bed Frame or you're still just chilling on a full-size on the floor of a converted loft, we all spend roughly a third of our lives in the cozy solace of our beds—snoozing, makin' love, or playing Stardew Valley on our phones until 3 in the morning—but many mass-manufactured mattresses are positively belching out chemical pollutants, including flame retardants, plastics, and VOCs (volatile organic compounds). Scientific American describes the bad-stuff stew found in the typical bed as "a nightmare," but there is hope for making your sleeping nest a better place for both your health and the Earth—and the best place to start is by swapping in an eco-friendly mattress. There are a ton of new-ish brands that fit the bill, but the most best-known and most beloved is probably Avocado, which has a CVS-receipt-sized list of eco-friendly certifications and makes its ultra-comfy beds out of biodegradable, recyclable organic latex, organic certified wool, organic certified cotton, and exactly zero nasty chemicals. There's even a wool-free vegan version, and it's all needle-tufted by hand by fairly paid workers who make a living wage. The company also donates 1% of its revenue to environmental nonprofits, as well as participates in a bunch of other climate-change-fighting initiatives that you can read about on its website. But most importantly, people love sleeping on its cloud-like mattresses, which have five zones with a whopping 1,414 pocketed support coils designed to offer the best zzz's possible.

If Avocado isn't your bag, also check out Brentwood Home's 100% carbon-offset Crystal Cove mattress, or Eco Terra's hybrid latex mattress, which is currently super on sale for Earth Day. (Also, do your research so you pick a mattress you're happy with, and that you'll stick with for years to come; don't end up being one of those assholes who cycles through free mattress trials, creating a nightmare in our landfills.) 

We all know plastic really sucks, and ICYMI, we found out during the chaos of 2020 that plastic doesn't even get recycled, so we've been kidding ourselves into believing that all of those empty two-liters and clamshells of romaine were somehow gonna have a second, let alone third or fourth, life. Yet most of the food we buy in grocery stores or get as takeout continues to come in plastic packaging. Some of that is outside our control, but what we can do is make our homes a plastic-free zone, with more sustainable food storage solutions. Package Free Shop is a great place to start for zero-waste essentials, from wax food wraps (for that random avocado half in your fridge) to laundry detergent in a jar and biodegradable pet poop bags, and it’s offering 30% off with the code EARTH.

Also, when considering stuff like Tupperware, think about how much cooler a 1920s vintage glass container looks (and how much longer it will last) than some throwaway plastic junk. We all know Mason jars are the bomb, but in case it needs to be said, glass is the way to go, or as we like to say, "glass gets ass." (We mean that in a good way.) From Amazon jar sets with bamboo lids to these vintage French green canning jars from Food52, these vessels are as chic as they are guilt-free. Just look at that colorblocked set by Pols Potten! Deserves FROW on your counters.

For the love of goddess, please stop buying battery-operated vibrators. It’s hard, admittedly, when there are so many charming bullet vibrators out there, but sustainable sex toys are starting to gain more and more of a presence in the sexual wellness industry, and picking out a good vibrator is an ~investment~ that should be able to go the distance with you and your pleasurable orifices. That’s why we were jazzed to learn that Womanizer (as in, the makers of the iconic and near-sentient dual vibrator the Womanizer Duo) has an eco-friendly clitoral vibrator. Dubbed the “PREMIUM Eco,” it uses the same Pleasure Air Technology that makes the brand’s other clit suction toys so rad, and it’s both biodegradable and wrapped in 100-percent plastic-free (and recyclable) packaging.

When lockdowns first started, our roommate-heavy household thanked the gods for our reliable Grove subscription. Not only does this company’s “tree-free” bamboo toilet paper, tissues, and paper towels come right when you need them, but they come in totally plastic-free packaging, and as you build your subscription, you’ll have the option of tacking on loads of helpful complimentary goodies (coconut scrubber sponges, Mrs. Meyer’s Hand Soap products) to your order. This is one of those companies you’re going to want to keep tabbed, as their eco-friendly shopping sections just keep expanding. Run to them when you need household goods, like laundry powder packs. Check out their surprisingly exhaustive beauty selection (which even includes perfume??), and when/if you pop out some kids, they’ve got you with the diapers. 

Sure, it can be fun to absolutely destroy grime and grease with nuclear-strength chemicals from the hardware store, but think about what you're really spraying all over your home—including your eating surfaces—as well as all of the plastic bottles that industry leaves behind. Blueland makes refillable home cleaning sprays for all surfaces, from kitchen to bathroom, and works by offering refillable "Forever Bottles" that you can then refill in seconds using tablets customized for various purposes, from laundry to hand soap. It's an amazing concept, and the company also ships everything in recyclable and biodegradable packaging free of single-use plastic. Cleancult and Force of Nature offer similar services, if you wanna shop around—which, of course, is never a bad idea, and the latter is having a 40% off sale right now with the code YESPLEASE at check-out.

Now go give Mommy Earth a nice big kiss. 

The Rec Room staff independently selected all of the stuff featured in this story.