WHITEFISH — Sarah Harding and her family were on a trip of a life time to West Sumatra.
Harding recalled, "We'd pull up to these absolutely gorgeous beaches that were you know, white sand, palm trees, blue ocean all around them and then, they'd be covered in plastic and it was just heart-breaking."
So she starting brainstorming: "We've got to do better. So I said okay, so I'll go home and make shampoo bars. And I kind of just made them for me, because it was what I wanted. I wanted to try and not use so much plastic."
Now Harding makes homemade natural shampoo bars for others, too, with her Coconut at Sea Soap Company (click here to visit the website).
Her friend Robin Kelson emphasized just how important being aware of plastic recycling is - if plastic ends up in landfills, she says it can be detrimental to our health: "The plastic doesn't actually break down completely, it just gets smaller and smaller and smaller due to solar degradation and then it actually gets into the air. We breathe it, our children breathe it. It's just probably not healthy long term."
Kelson says it's a topic people need to hear about: "Our capacity to recycle is about twenty percent of what it was about five years ago."
If you want easy ways to decrease plastic use, Kelson suggests using a refillable water bottle and coffee cup and re usable grocery bags.
