Did you know there is a natural hair conditioner that you can get from your own garden and kitchen? How amazing is that? No harmful chemicals, you get to save on money and you don’t have to buy conditioner in plastic containers that add to plastic waste.

Bathrooms are typically full of lots of plastic bottles and 80% of these get thrown away even though they are recyclable. I’m sure most of you can relate?

So, I’ve made it a mission to look for more ways to lessen plastic use and plastic found in my house and I came up with a few ideas that you can do, too.

Here’s some ideas on how to use things from your garden and kitchen to nourish your hair.

To learn more about growing a permaculture garden simply and easily, check out our course The Incredible Edible Garden and learn how to design your own permaculture landscape in our Permaculture Design Course.

Transcript:

Hi it’s Morag gamble from a Permaculture Life in the Permaculture Education Institute. And welcome back into my garden, we’re talking this month about ways that we can get rid of single-use plastic in our lives it’s Plastic Free July.

Now one of the things that it’s a place where we get lots of plastic is the bathroom and actually most of the bottles of stuff that we have in the bathroom get chucked out. Even though they’re recyclable and interestingly you know most of these bottles for shampoos and conditioners. Most of these get chucked out even if they can be recycled or refilled. So you can actually take these back in to say a bulk food store and get them refilled with shampoos or conditioners. And you can actually buy these little tops that mean that, you can sort of replace them with nice new pump packs that are actually really helpful when you’ve got you know young kids as well. If you don’t have a bulk food store close by, then you know maybe it’s something you can do to bulk buy with friends as well. You can actually order a bulk pack of shampoo or conditioner a natural one. Without the fragrances or the chemicals and split it up amongst your friends. This is a really great thing to do, too. But what if you actually don’t want to use those bottles because actually, every one of these bottles it takes about a quarter. If you filled it up with fossil fuels to about a quarter. That’s how much energy it takes to produce each bottle in terms of its production, transportation, everything which is kind of huge when you think about it. So what else can you do apart from having a plastic filled bathroom? Well, there’s a lot of things actually, and one of the things that I wanted to show you today is and it’s why. I’m sitting out in the garden using aloe vera as a conditioner. So I simply take a section of an aloe vera leaf and I slice up, take a section of it like this and just open it up. Now some people are a bit sensitive to them, to the liquid that’s in between the skin and the clear gel.

So what I’ve done with this is, I actually chopped it and then I set it in the sink to allow it to drain. And then just washed off any of that yellow liquid. So that helps to prevent any sort of sensitive skin issues. But for most people it’s absolutely fine. So I just open it up like this and then that’s what I shampooed my hair, grab a chunk of our view and just smear it through my hair, combing in and leave it as a leave-in conditioner. So that’s a conditioner and then once you’re finished with that, it just gets composted so there’s no bottle or anything. And once you get on your hands, you can rub it into your hands, rub it into your face as well. So the whole thing is absolutely usable all over your body and I really love it for that. And that’s why, I’ve got it here right close to the veranda so I can use it as a daily thing for hair or face or skin. And I can also use it if there’s anything, like burns and other first-aid needs that I have with it. But there’s other things that you can do to have zero waste plastic waste. In terms of conditioner, coconut oil from your kitchen is really great. So if you have dry ends and the kind of hair that I have, does quite often get dry in. So you just grab a little bit of coconut oil, and you just massage it into the ends. So that’s easy. Now if you’ve got a build up of our products and you’ve been using it for a long time, or you just want to soften the hair and make it more shiny. You can actually use apple cider vinegar to rinse your hair after you’ve done your shampooing and just leave it in for a minute or so. When you’re in the shower, just pour it through and then rinse it out and it’ll make a huge difference in your hair. Now I made this one here and I’ve got, I’ll put a link below to show you how you can make it just out of scraps. From Apple skins and apple cores as well.

So you don’t even have to buy the plastic bottles that the vinegar comes in normally. So there’s a few tips on how to reduce plastic in your bathroom and particularly around using plastic shampoo and conditioner bottle. So one recycling we’re using them or refusing them, and actually using things out of your garden or make your own from scraps in the kitchen. So catch me again tomorrow back in my garden for another tip about how you can actually integrate your permaculture way of thinking your garden and becoming far less dependent on the plastics that surround us in our world.