Tayla has started doing something small in the supermarket. She reaches past the plastic and takes one of the paper mushroom bags instead, for whatever she is buying loose. It takes a second, it costs nothing, and after a few weeks you stop noticing you are doing it. Almost every good change starts about that size.
A trolley is a vote, and it gets counted every single week. When enough people reach for the braver product, the company making it grows and the whole shelf notices. Somebody had to be first to put a refill in a lipstick, and being first is expensive and frightening. The happiest thing we can do is find them, buy what they made, and say so out loud.
The one we would start with is free, and Tayla introduced us to it. Project Pan began in the beauty community and it is exactly what it sounds like. You use what you already own all the way down to the pan, the little metal tray at the bottom of an eyeshadow, before you buy another. People pick a few items, set themselves a goal and post their progress, and it has quietly turned finishing something into an achievement worth sharing. Tayla has been doing it for two years, and she puts the saving at more than ten thousand dollars. Ten thousand dollars, from finishing things she had already paid for. And every one of those tubes and compacts she used to the very end is a tube and a compact that was never made, never shipped and never thrown away. Two years of quietly not buying something takes real dedication, and it turns out the planet and the bank account were on the same side the whole time.
No garden and no green bin, and your scraps can still go to soil. Peels is a free map connecting people who have food scraps with neighbours nearby who compost. A non commercial community project started by a Sydneysider, Danny White, it has been picked up by North Sydney, Northern Beaches and Merri-bek councils. It turns a bucket under the sink into somebody's tomatoes.
Your washing machine has a direct line to the ocean. Every wash of a synthetic garment sheds tiny plastic fibres that leave with the water. A filter on the machine, or a wash bag, will catch them, and France has already written filters into law for new machines, the first country in the world to do it. The cheapest version of this swap happens in the shop, by choosing wool, cotton and linen over polyester.
The dishwasher, run full, beats the sink. This one surprises almost everybody, because the machine feels like the extravagant choice and it is the other way round. A University of Bonn study found households without a dishwasher used more than twice as much water on their dishes as households with one. Run it full, and scrape rather than rinse. And that aisle has quietly become one of the best in the shop: plant based tablets and powders now clean as well as anything else on the shelf, the good ones come in a cardboard box rather than a plastic tub, and what they leave on your plates and forks is a great deal gentler than what we all grew up with.
So here is a starter list, and it is deliberately unfinished.
What you already buy, and the braver version
Loose fruit and vegetables · the paper mushroom bag, or a mesh bag from home
The make up you already own · Project Pan. Use every item right down to the pan before you buy another, then make the next one refillable. Tayla has run it for two years and puts her saving past ten thousand dollars
Chewing gum · the tree sap kind. Most gum base is a plastic, the same family as bottles and tennis balls. Chicle, tapped from the sapodilla tree, is what the Maya chewed and it is back on shelves
Your cup of tea · the bag with a string and a staple, or loose leaf. The heat sealed ones are held shut with a thin film of plastic, and yours is steeping in boiling water, so this one keeps a little more out of the ocean and out of our tummies
Clothes · wool, cotton and linen over polyester, which stops the fibres at the source
Food scraps, with no garden · a neighbour's compost heap through Peels
Anything for a renovation · salvaged materials from The Bower at Marrickville or Summer Hill
Cling film · the beeswax wrap, the silicone lid, or a plate over the bowl
Now add to it. That is the whole point of the list.
Then go to the markets. This is where the fun is. The best of these ideas turn up on a trestle table long before they reach a shop, and the northern rivers around Byron are a treasure trove of people quietly inventing better versions of ordinary things. Pick it up, then talk to whoever made it. They will tell you what it is made of, why they started and what they are working on next, and you will walk away with a swap nobody else has heard of yet.
Others have done a great deal of the digging already, and two of the best are Australian.
Where to go looking
Good On You · more than three thousand clothing and beauty brands rated out of five on people, planet and animals. Founded in Australia in 2015 by Gordon Renouf.
Shop Ethical! · the Ethical Consumer Group's guide to the companies behind Australian supermarket brands, from more than fifty sources. Book, app and website, so you can check a label in the aisle.
iFixit · teardowns and free repair manuals for almost anything with a plug, so you can find out whether a thing comes apart before you buy it.
So this is our ask, and it is a genuine one. What have you changed, and did it turn out better than what it replaced? We especially want your finds: the product you were surprised to see on a shelf, the small company doing something braver than the big one beside it, the maker at a market whose name we should all know. Send it, we will look into it properly, and if it stands up we will write it as its own story and name the people behind it. A selection runs in a coming edition, with your first name and town, or anonymously if you would rather.
Because there is a real pleasure in being early. In trying something before most people have heard of it, in backing the person who made it while it is still brave of them, and in watching an idea travel from a market stall to a supermarket shelf because enough of us picked it up. None of that happens to us. It happens with us. Come and be early alongside everybody else who is quietly getting on with it.
Send us your find, whichever way suits you
Instagram · comment or send a message to @earthtoseanews
Facebook · leave it in the comments on our page
Email · [email protected], with the words My change in the subject line
An Earth to Sea News original. The idea for this piece, and for the swap outs, came from Tayla McMahon, who introduced us to Project Pan and whose two year run of it is the ten thousand dollars in the story, her own figure. With thanks to Peels, the free community composting map started by Danny White and endorsed by North Sydney, Northern Beaches and Merri-bek councils, and to The Bower Reuse and Repair Centre at Marrickville and Summer Hill. On the washing machine filters: France adopted the requirement in its anti waste law, applying to new machines from 1 January 2025, and remains the only country to have legislated it, but the technical definitions the law relies on have not been published, so it is not yet enforceable. On the dishwasher: University of Bonn research on household water use, widely reported, and confirmed by consumer testing bodies. On gum: conventional gum base is built on synthetic polymers, and chicle, the sap of the sapodilla tree, is the plant based original. On tea: heat sealed bags are bonded with a polypropylene film, while string and tag bags are folded and stitched instead. Photograph: Unsplash.