Zero-Waste Living With No Entry Cost

Connect with us!

If you’re feeling as much dread about the state of our environment as me, you’ve probably thought a lot about reducing your own environmental impact, specifically the waste you produce. If trying to do that makes you feel overwhelmed and unsure how to start like me, you’ve probably done a few google searches with help living a zero waste lifestyle.

So what do you find? Articles of 25, 50, 100 new products to buy to live waste free. Shiny online shops with paper thin eco-friendly aesthetics. Does this all seem a bit contradictory? I thought so.

This is a guide on how to reduce overconsumption, waste, and your personal environmental footprint while buying as little as possible. You’ll also find tips on how to determine if eco aesthetic products are truly beneficial for the environment.

1. Separating Quality From Greenwashing

Picture an eco-friendly product. You may be imagining brown paper packaging, green leaf designs, wood, and clean neutral colors. Greenwashing is when products and companies make themselves appear eco-friendly to get sales, but don’t actually have any meaningful claims. Take the packaging you were just picturing. Brown, natural looking paper packaging makes you think it's recycled and recyclable, but often that's just an aesthetic choice. The packaging may also have less visible plastic and non recyclable components.

Other red flags to look for when watching for greenwashing are vague, meaningless claims that have no criteria and no hard facts behind them, misleading statistics, and companies that will advertise big charitable gestures done for publicity with no real thought behind them.

Green flags or positive signs that a company isn’t just greenwashing is having clear and verifiable claims on their website or packaging, transparency about their manufacturing processes and steps taken to ensure low impact, and accreditation by reliable third party organizations.

2. Use What You Have First

This one may seem obvious, but when you’re making a lifestyle change it can be tempting to want to go all in right away, especially with all of these lists of “must buy products”. Keep in mind that the name of the game is reducing consumption, and the best thing you can do to live with zero waste is not buy anything new until you truly need it. Instead, work on these zero waste hacks that you won’t need to buy anything for:

Reuse glass jars and bottles for storage
- Wash out those jam and pasta sauce jars and use them to store leftovers, bulk goods, or for picking and fermenting.
- Plastic containers like from takeout can be reused too- just be careful about using them for food. Many cannot be safely reheated and may start shedding microplastics after multiple uses. Instead, I use mine for craft supplies.

Take reusable totes for grocery shopping
- Have random reusable bags lying around? Try to bring one with you whenever you run errands instead of getting disposable paper or plastic bags.

Change your takeout plan
- We all have those days when we just need to order takeout, but it comes with so much excess waste. If you can, specify no paper napkins or plastic utensils in your order. If you can’t, save them to use later for parties, camping, or anywhere else they might be useful.

3. Products That Are Actually Worth Buying

Alright, we're finally here. These are eco-friendly products that are truly worth buying right now:

Reusable snack pouches and beeswax food wraps
- These are an essential replacement for plastic sandwich bags and plastic wrap. They won't just save the environment, they'll save you money too!
- Shell out the extra bucks for stasher if you want something microwave, oven, and dishwasher safe, or go for rezip for a more affordable option that's still high quality.

Plastic free reusable food containers
- Metal, ceramic, glass, and silicone containers are all a great way to store food and bring it on the go that will reduce your plastic consumption and not shed microplastics into your food.

Swedish dishcloths
- Replace paper towels and sponges all in one fell swoop. These highly durable and absorbent towels can be washed up 300 times, replacing around 15 paper towel rolls each.
- Try If You Care for a well acredited product with compostable recycled packaging.

Most Popular

Protein Rice Krispie Treats

Nov 11, 2025

Ask The Baker

Sensible Edibles is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases. This means that if you click on an Amazon link on our site and make a purchase, we may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. We only recommend products and services that we believe will add value to our readers.