Düsseldorf, 6 May 2020 – It is not always easy to avoid plastic in everyday life. Sustainability expert and founder of Pacific Garbage Screening, Marcella Hansch, who is developing a platform with her team to filter plastic waste from rivers, also knows that living plastic-free poses many challenges. But she is convinced that anyone can have a big impact by changing small things: “Consumers can influence the variety and quantity of environmentally friendly solutions through conscious purchasing decisions – not only by using plastic-free alternatives or reducing consumption in general, but also by making conscious decisions against environmentally harmful options and by passing on environmentally friendly recommendations to family and friends. In this way, you encourage awareness and motivate others to participate.”

In five practical tips, she reveals how plastic can be avoided in everyday life simply and easily.

Lunchbox to go
When having a quick lunch or a take-out dinner, you can easily avoid plastic waste by having your favorite Chinese restaurant fill your brought-along lunch box. Numerous restaurants, bakeries and supermarkets accept these boxes that customers bring along. Granted: Sometimes you will attract disapproving looks and it is often annoying to carry the lunchbox around with you, but by doing so, environmentally harmful packaging, such as plastic, aluminum foil or polystyrene, which merely serve to transport the food and are disposed of afterwards, can be easily avoided. In rare cases, it may happen that some shops do not accept the box you have brought along.

Goodbye, plastic bottles
An everyday misery: beverage crates and plastic bottles piling up in the storage room. Moreover, besides the obvious waste caused by plastic bottles, up to seven liters of water are needed to produce one liter of bottled water. GROHE offers an innovative approach to reducing the number of plastic bottles – on average around 800 per year for a family of four – in the home to a minimum with its GROHE Blue water system: filtered, chilled and even sparkling water directly from the kitchen faucet. Just like that, the dragging of bottle crates becomes a thing of the past; and with high-quality glass bottles for home and cool drinking bottles for on the go, there is nothing to stop you from avoiding plastic bottles in your everyday life.

An alternative to cling film
To make leftover food last longer, we often use cling film. But there are environmentally friendly alternatives, such as beeswax wraps. You can easily make these yourself at home: take some cotton cloth and cut it to size, then melt beeswax in a water bath and brush the cotton cloth with it. Iron over it, let it dry and the reusable, sustainable wrap is ready to use.

Vegetable bags for shopping
Whether at the weekly market or in supermarkets: vegetables and fruit do not need to be wrapped in plastic or paper bags, which are usually thrown away after being used, anyway. Convenient helpers such as vegetable bags with which you can pack your loose vegetables and fruits, are very useful here. A little advice: the bags are usually very small and handy – just place them in pockets and jackets, so you always have a vegetable bag with you, even when you go shopping spontaneously.

Avoid microplastics with wash bags
Many of our garments, such as sportswear, contain synthetic fibers. That’s in itself not really a problem, but these textiles release microfibers with every wash cycle, and so microplastics pass unnoticed through the wastewater into the groundwater. A great way to avoid this is using wash bags. These bags not only catch microplastics, but also protect our clothes, for example from holes caused by zippers. A very simple trick with a big impact!

For further information about GROHE and its sustainability topics go to green.grohe.com