It's Spring!

Or at least as far as I'm concerned, it is.  In my world here in northern NJ, spring started over the weekend.  Not because of the rising temperatures, though that certainly makes me happy, but because Saturday night the clocks changed!  It wears me out, more than you'd think a one-hour time change should, but it also makes me happy to be leaving the office in daylight.

And the other reason it started to feel like spring this weekend is because on Saturday was the first annual FLOW Green Fair (FLOW = Franklin Lakes, Oakland, Wyckoff), and I had a hand in it!  It was organized and hosted by the three environmental commissions, with my own commission chair and town's green team really spearheading it.  If you ask me, although of course as a first year event it had a couple logistical issues, it was a raving success.

I did two things for the fair, specifically.  The first was getting the president of the Northeast NJ Beekeepers Association (my local club) to take a booth and teach everyone about bees.  He had a lot of interest, of course.

And the second?  I spent the day face panting, of course!  I figured they had enough help with the environmental displays and organization, and it was something I could offer that others couldn't.  I was a hit.

Then again, so were the displays and the hip hopping fruit.

Scrubs May Be Good for Your Skin... But What Are They Doing to Your World?

Good question, and one we all should be asking.  This is why we are adamant that we should all be informed consumers.  Read your labels.  Know your ingredients.  Do a little digging.

Hillary Rosner, a freelance journalist and Knight Science Journalism Fellow with a degree in Environmental Studies did a little digging back in 2008, when she wrote this article for Slate, an online daily news magazine.  Never heard of Slate?  That's OK, until recently, neither had I.  When a friend pointed me in the direction of that article, I took a look around, and it turns out that Slate is not exactly a fly-by-night operation.  It's not some wacky extremist group with faulty research and questionable results.  Oh, no.  It's a multi-award-winning publication that's existed since 1996 and is owned by The Washington Post Company.

In doing her digging, Ms. Rosner found that many big-brand companies are using polyethylene as an exfoliating ingredient in their cleansers.

So what's polyethylene?  It's plastic.  Tiny plastic microbeads that make nifty exfoliants... which then wash down the drain and into the oceans.

Plastic, as we know, does not biodegrade.  And these beads are so tiny that it's incredibly easy for them to end up in the stomachs of marine life, as Ms. Rosner says, "from otters to octopi."  It actually occupies the same size range as sand grains and plankton, so it's available for ingestion to invertebrates, which are near the bottom of the marine food chain.  In addition, polyethylene transports phenanthrene, a dangerous ocean pollutant.

Nice, huh?

And the amount of microplastic in the oceans has been increasing.  Increasing.

The answer?

Natural exfoliants, of course!  Sugar, salt, ground almonds, ground beans, seeds, and buds... the sorts of things we use in our Reef Botanicals sugar and salt scrubs, soaps, and facial scrubs.

We are committed to doing our best for the environment where we can.  That's why we don't wrap our soaps in plastic or cellophane; they are shipped nearly naked, with just enough paper to tell you what they are and list the ingredients for you, tied on with environmentally-friendly hemp twine.

That's why the only plastic we use is what's absolutely necessary, like for our salt and sugar scrubs, which contain liquid.  And that's one of the many reasons we adhere to our commitment to use all-natural ingredients in our products.  Never will plastic be an ingredient in our stuff, no matter how inexpensive or convenient it is.

Reef Botanicals Goes Earth-Friendly

In addition to being approved by Green People for our use of all-natural ingredients, we do make an attempt to keep things as Earth-friendly as possible at Reef Botanicals. For packing materials, we recycle the packing paper in which our supplies are shipped to us, and if we run out of that, we shred the supermarket bags from our own purchases. At craft fairs, we sell our soaps and shampoos "naked," to avoid wasteful packaging where we can.

We also like, of course, to pack as much into one single box as possible, to lessen the transportation impact on the environment. It's better for the environment if you stock up all at once than if you make single-item purchases one at a time. Therefore, in honor of Earth Day, all orders over $10 placed at Reef Botanicals on April 22, between midnight and midnight EST, will qualify for FREE SHIPPING!

Sorry, U.S. orders only.