Always find yourself wasting your favorite beautifiers? There are a few easy changes you can make to break the cycle and even make your beauty products last longer!

You would think a natural and organic beauty routine would be enough to tick off another eco box, but converting to the green side doesn’t rid you of that one thing all eco-conscious folk feel–waste guilt.

Want to quit throwing out products (and money)? Discover some of the ways you can do just that and streamline your beauty stash in the process.

1. Buy Less, Waste Less

It sounds simple enough, but buying more than we need is probably the beauty sin we’re all most guilty of doing.

One of the biggest perks of natural beauty products is the fact they go further. Whereas a conventional jar of moisturizer may last you four weeks, the waterless, organic equivalent could keep you going for four months, so resist the urge to stockpile. By the time it’s time to top-up, that bottle you bought when you thought you were being ultra-organized may be close to expiring.

2. Mixology

Can you count the number of times you’ve used that $30 lipstick on one hand? There’s nothing wrong with wanting to stay on trend, but when you makeup color palette extends beyond the visible spectrum, it might be time to rethink your cosmetic needs.

Instead of buying this season’s hottest shade (every season), get creative! Cast your mind back to art class and figure out how you can recreate it using what you already have at your disposal. Brown and gold eyeshadow? Voila, bronze!

Non-toxic, cream based formulas also give you a little extra room to play around they’re far easier to mix than powders. Try RMS Beauty which has lip, cheek, eye, and highlight colors all in easy-to-blend cream textures. If you catch onto a winning combination you could even pre-mix your chosen shades in a sample pot!

3. Try Before You Buy

Some products just won’t work for you, and usually, you find out when it’s already made itself at home in your beauty cabinet.

Avoid the heartache by getting your hands on a sample first. The Detox Market allow you to build a kit of five samples for under $10, whereas Integrity Botanicals offer free samples with every order. Added bonus? They make great travel buddies.

4. Think Outside the Box

Or at least what the box says. Every natural beauty knows oils are multitasking miracle workers, but we don’t always put that knowledge to use. Just because something is designed to be a great body oil doesn’t mean it won’t do wonders for your hair, too!

Start to take note of which carrier oils do the job best for all-over use, and put them to work. Just a few include jojoba, coconut, almond, and grapeseed oils. Look out for products that champion these, and there should be no reason why you can’t

Balms are always fantastic for taking care of multiple beauty needs, too. A makeup remover, moisturizer, lip balm, and hair tamer all in one jar? Minimalism at its finest.

5. Keep Them Funk-Free

Ever opened up your favorite body sugar scrub got a whiff of something not-so-sweet? Natural beauty products have fewer preservatives, which can be a double-edged sword at times.

While it’s great to avoid synthetics, it also means the shelf life of a lot of your favorite plant-based beautifiers is short – especially when compared to conventional products. As well as keeping an eye on expiry dates to make sure you use them up in time, you can get smart and store them in a way that maximizes their lifespan.

When it comes to formulas that are completely preservative-free, you want to keep water out at all costs. That means keeping that scrub out of the shower, and in a cupboard! Heat and light can also damage the structure and potency of botanical ingredients. The lesson to make them last longer? Keep your products in a cool, dark and dry place when possible.

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This year, resolve to get your waste down to a size zero.

How much rubbish did you throw out last year? If you’re anything like the average person, you threw away your own body weight in rubbish every seven weeks. But have you ever stopped to think where “away” is? Away is no magical place full of rainbows and fairies where everything is transformed into something lovely. No, “away” is a landfill site, an incinerator, or a ship to China. It might even be a turtle’s mouth.

In the New Year why not make a resolution for the earth by resolving to get your waste to a svelte size zero? It’s fun, challenging and, better still, it won’t cost you anything. It might even save you money.

In 2009, my family set ourselves to the challenge of accumulating no more than one trash can of landfill for the entire year. Here’s the result.

After having our bin emptied live on breakfast television (what a claim to fame!) and our story spreading around the world we decided to see how low we could go. By the end of the following year, this was our contribution to landfill:

Don’t let this overwhelm you. It took us 18 months of gradual reduction to get to that level. Putting your bin on a diet is like losing weight yourself, the odd pound every week soon adds up to significant change. Soon the only pounds you’ll be gaining will be in your wallet while your trash can will be looking slim and sophisticated.

If you’re up for the challenge, here are 16 tips to get you started:

1. Take your own reusable bags to the store and say no to disposable plastic bags.

2. Make full use of your curbside collections; what could be simpler than rinsing and recycling at home?

3. Set up a collection point in your home for materials you can take to a local recycling bank.

4. Check your schedule and mark in your diary the times when you are traveling past a recycling bank – start taking your materials with you.

5. Instead of throwing away toys, books and clothes, find your nearest thrift store and do your bit for humanity as well as the environment.

6. Decluttering larger items? Join your local Freecycle group where you’ll find people in your area who think your trash is treasure.

7. Become a secret spy – check any packaging you’re thinking of buying for recycling information. If you can’t recycle it easily look for alternatives and complain to the manufacturer.

8. Choose one disposable item you regularly use and swap for the reusable version (think disposable pens, kitchen towels, diapers and sanitary napkins).

9. Reduce paper waste by signing up for paperless billing (this often saves you money too) and stopping junk mail at the source.

10. Make something you usually buy in packaging such as bread, cakes or biscuits. It’s better for you and cheaper, too.

11. Make friends with your local retailers. Ask your butcher, baker or deli to sell you things in your own reusable containers.

12. Start a compost heap or wormery, you’ll be able to turn your fruit and vegetable peelings into something valuable for the garden.

13. Speaking of gardening, grow some of your own food. Even if you don’t have a garden you can grow in window boxes or on the kitchen windowsill.

14. Banish the word “leftovers” from your vocabulary. From now on you have tomorrow’s ingredients.

15. Make do and mend. We live in a disposable culture but the reward of knitting, sewing, crochet and woodwork is tremendous.

16. And now the philosophical part: learn to separate your wants from your needs.

Are you ready to resolve to give up waste in 2012? Tell me how you’re going to start and I’ll be your personal cheerleader.

Images: Paula Bailey; Anorak; VegPlotting

After reading an article about the effects of plastics on marine life, Rachelle Strauss and her husband (a.k.a. Mr. and Mrs. Green) vowed to live a life less wasteful and started the popular UK-based site My Zero Waste, which encourages its readers to make small changes in their homes, using less resources along the way.

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The author of the hugely successful UK blog My Zero Waste challenges people to join a waste-free week away from home.

I recycle so much trash it’s embarrassing. To show you the state of my bins would be to out me as a hard-pressed consumer whose attempts at not producing waste are at most futile.

Prior to encountering the Greens – a.k.a. Rachelle Strauss, her husband Richard, their seven year-old daughter and black-and-white kitty cat, who’s now deceased, I felt rather confident with my waste management skills. Overall, I’d give myself a seven out of ten. Until I saw this:

It was enough to make me shrivel. That, my friends, is what Rachelle, author of the hugely successful UK green blog My Zero Waste, was sending to the dump one month last winter.

A combination of albatross and sea turtle horror stories, plus a “traumatic” family vacation evacuation blamed on “strange weather” led them to embark on their zero waste experiment, which they now sustain as a way of life.

Let’s take a bottle of milk as an example. Silica-sand is formed into glass and then made into a bottle, which is filled with milk and sold to the consumer. A responsible consumer would toss that bottle into a recycling bin. A Zero Waste consumer would return the bottle to the original distributor to be washed, refilled, and sold to someone else. The only “waste” produced would be the water the bottled is washed with, but even that can serve its purpose.

Zero-wasting (or even nominally wasting), is all rather simple, and doable, particularly from the comfort of your own home. Controlling outside waste, however, is the real challenge. Like, I never remember to say no to straws while out and about, because they remind me of Shirley Temples. I would never drink a Shirley Temple now, of course, because of the “empty calorie” factor. Instead, I’m producing “empty waste.”

In their fourth annual Zero Waste Week, Strauss and friends are focusing on “Reducing waste away from home.” You can join them from September 5^th to the 11^th by participating in small, but impactful, acts of waste reduction. For example, use your own travel mug. Bring fruit peelings and cores accumulated on the road to compost at home. Avoid straws and disposable cutlery when eating out.

Also, chime in your efforts on My Zero Waste. Sign up for the Facebook event. Even tweet with the hashtag #nzww.

It might seem small or self-evident until we consider the milk bottle again. After it’s washed, refilled and resold, imagine if the consumer on the other end was a zero-waster like you. Now, that would be a veritable flash mob – one worth boasting about.

Images: ruminatrix; John Wardell

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