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I RECENTLY WENT to the beach on one of those perfect summer days — not too hot, but warm enough to make a swim in the normally icy Atlantic Ocean feel like a refreshing and exhilarating experience. I was floating carefree in the water, basking in the sunshine, when I suddenly felt something graze my arm. A fish? Even worse, a shark? I recoiled in panic, only to find an empty Diet Coke bottle bobbing along in the water. No biggie. I’ll just take this to the recycling bin on the way back to the car, I thought. As I made my way back to shore, I spotted a plastic bottle cap. Then a shampoo bottle. Then a chip bag. I tried to grab them as they got battered by waves and swept back out to sea. I returned to my friends with a heavy heart. “Where did you get that Diet Coke?” one of them asked.

Plastic is cheap and it’s made to last, quite literally, forever. When it was first invented around the turn of the twentieth century, plastic seemed like a way to preserve the earth’s natural resources by using fewer of them. But fast-forward to today, and every minute the equivalent of two garbage trucks full of plastic is dumped into the ocean. By 2050, it’s estimated that there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish, by weight. And all of these plastics can remain in the environment for more than 2,000 years.

Avoiding plastic is hard. Take a look inside your pantry. Or your refrigerator. Or your medicine cabinet. I doubt you’ll find even one item in these spaces that does not utilize some form of plastic in its packaging. And these are mostly single-use plastics, which, you may not realize, are not recycled even when you put them in your recycling bins. Looking at the contents of my bathroom shelf one day, I wondered how many of my daily-use products could be replaced with something non-plastic.

Thankfully, there are many ethical, environmentally friendly alternatives to most of my routine body care and cleaning products. They work just as well, if not better, than their plastic-encased counterparts — and almost always with healthier ingredients. Most of these products utilize an online subscription model, which makes ordering convenient and surprisingly affordable. Of course, using these products won’t solve pollution or rescue us from climate change, but you’ll be doing a small part to keep what you consume out of the oceans and landfills while supporting small businesses that are making an effort to turn the tide away from single-use plastics.