My Sustainable Nighttime Routine
After a day of school or work, how do I wind down in the evenings without sacrificing the planet?
As often as I can, especially this time of year when the weather is nicer and the days are longer, I like to go on a walk as soon as Dan and I are both home. We look for geocaches, ID plants and birds, and catch up on our days.
After that, it’s dinner time! We love to cook but often don’t have the time to cook every single night. So to save money and reduce waste, we just eat leftovers. We’ve been in a good groove for a few years where we each pick one meal per week and just make a ton of it. We eat these leftovers for lunches and dinners throughout the week. We’ve been cooking on our Caraway pots and pans and eating off of Year and Day plates as well as bowls that we get from local potters, including our friends!
All of our veggie scraps get composted in our worm composter on our balcony or our local curbside compost pickup service. Learn more about vermicomposting here and curbside composting here.
After dinner, our routines vary, but we like to have a sort of “menu” of things to do:
We both love to read and often spend our evenings doing this. We get books from our library, Thriftbooks, or local bookstores to avoid mega corporations. Shop small!
More rarely, we play Mariokart or other videogame together on our secondhand Switch
We also try to do “Art Time” as often as we can. It’s a low stakes way to be together while creating something with our own brains and hands. It’s just 15 minutes minimum to set down the tech and pick up your work in progress. Check out ways I make my art sustainable here.
Several times a week you can also catch us hanging out with friends going out swing dancing, having a board game night, roller blading, or just chatting at the local brewery. We borrow or rent gear or just use what we already have.
We’ve been back in our Outlander phase and instead of streaming it time and time again, I just bought the DVDs secondhand on Thriftbooks!
Now, for actual bedtime. Here is the order of events:
Shower time! I only wash my hair once a week to preserve the color, but when I do, I use Babo Botanicals shampoo and conditioner since it is color safe.
For body wash, we get bars that are made locally to support our neighbors but I do love to lather with a 100% plastic-free Floofah!
Face wash is from Plaine Products. I’ve been using it for years and love that they recently started carrying a larger size!
For drying, we’ve been using Quince towels since we moved into this apartment and will never go back. They are 100% natural fibers and so soft and luxurious.
Moving on to oral hygiene, this is not my most sustainable. I use plastic floss since my teeth are super tight and they just shred the natural fibers. But I do use a refillable floss pick I got on Etsy! Toothpaste is just whatever brand we can find locally with fluoride in it.
I give my hair a quick brush with a wooden hairbrush, nothing fancy. Then I pull it up before doing my skincare and often reach for Pina or Kooshoo hairties.
Speaking of skincare, I’ve been trying a few brands over the years! I love Rebrand and have recently been trying Axiology’s face oil. But I also love to get anything I can locally made to support my small businesses. Let me know your fav skincare below that I can try next but you can also hear more of my thoughts about other eco makeup, sunscreen, and haircare here.
Even Mochi has a sustainable-ish nighttime routine! Denahi used to, too, watch it here in his memory. She gets toothpaste from our local pet store that comes in a 100% metal tube and as a reward for the teeth brushing, she gets some snacks from Shameless Pets.
Then we all head to bed where we cozy up in our Sheets & Giggles sheets, Buffy comforter, and Avocado pillows. If we don’t read throughout the rest of the evening, we for sure do some reading before bed to limit screen time and wind down. Plus, I just like that I know I will always do some reading every single day! I do this at bed with books I get locally, thrifted, or on my secondhand e-reader in which I borrow library books.
It’s short and sweet, but it’s as eco as I can make it! What does your sustainable nighttime routine look like?
As always, remember that your small actions make a big difference in the long run :)
Emma
