For many of us, winter in the Upper Midwest means dry, cracked hands and nasty splits at the ends of our thumbs and fingers. The only way to avoid or at least mitigate this is to apply lotion to your hands after every hand washing, because soap removes too much of your skin’s natural moisturizing oils (lipids).
I’m not a big fan of pump dispensers when it comes to lotion. When the pump has pumped all the lotion it can, there is still a lot of lotion left behind in the bottle. And most of us don’t want to go through the extra effort needed to get to the remaining lotion, so we throw the bottle out rather than utilizing the remaining lotion and then recycling the bottle.
Recently, just to see how much lotion was left in a Gold Bond® pump dispenser (excellent lotion, by the way), we used a razor blade to cut all the way around the midsection of the lotion bottle, separating it into roughly two halves. Then we used a spoon to scoop out all the remaining lotion in the two halves and put it into a clean plastic tub—formerly a sour cream container. The amount of leftover lotion is substantial, as you can see in the photograph below. A many-days supply, to be sure!
We consumers need to put pressure on pump-dispenser lotion manufacturers to package their lotions in containers that make it easy to extract all the lotion. Some lotion manufacturers are already doing this, and we should purchase their products. O’Keeffe’s® Working Hands® is one good example.
Sometimes, lotion manufacturers package their product in both types of containers—pump dispensers and tub containers—but your local grocery store, pharmacy, or big-box store only carries the less environmentally-friendly pump-dispenser type of container. Do your research, and meet with the store manager to ask them to carry the tub container alternative instead of—or in addition to—the pump dispenser.
Each and every day we can make choices that are better for our environment. This is yet another example: use all the product and make it easy to recycle the container.