Hi there,
I’ve been real busy living a summer life, workin’, visiting friends, getting through my summer reading list, and making art. I still think of this blog every day! I promise I’m still here.
Today I’m ranting about plastic wrap. I don’t even need to introduce you to the frustrations of dealing with “glad wrap.” There’s nothing “glad” about it. It’s a single-use product meant to help you cover food, but it’s a completely unnecessary product, I think.
There are so many waste-free and wonderful alternatives! Some of them don’t even require you to buy anything. Use any ol’ jar with a lid to keep leftovers, fruits, and veggies in to use later. You can use Tupperware, glass airtight food storage “tupperware” for just about anything. Don’t go out and buy any of these things without looking through your own stock first. I love to use the giant Adam’s Peanut Butter jars for literally everything. They’re huge, you can freeze things in them, the lid is airtight, they’re just the best.
I always find glass food storage containers at thrift stores, same with mason jars or any other old jar with a lid. No need to buy new, ever! There’s plenty of stuff to go around! We like to use this glass bowl with 
a matching lid to put things in. This cabbage has been in here for *cough* wayyyyy too long, but it’s still looking and smelling fresh.
The second option for replacing plastic wrap requires a purchase, but I think it’s definitely worth it. I love to use beeswax wrap, a piece of cloth soaked in melted beeswax. It adheres to anything, and it melts from the heat of your hands, conforming to any shape you need it to. I use it to cover bowls, produce, and as a snack bag. I like to make my own, but you can purchase vegan reusable wax food wraps here from Tiny Yellow Bungalow, beeswax wrap here, here, or learn how to make your own from:
There are a few different ways to make them, I would say experiment. They all work. Fair warning: if you wash them in hot water, they will melt and get really crackly and probably not work as well. They also will start getting weird over time, but if they feel crackly and balls of beeswax are coming off, just pop it in the oven at 180 degrees for a couple minutes and the wax will remelt over them, making them good as new! They’re easier to maintain than it is to wrestle with cling wrap until you’re sweaty and out of breath.
Additionally, they are not completely airtight. Sometimes I will use two of them on top of a bowl if I need to keep air out.
I found some cool fabric recently at a thrift store, and decided to make beeswax wrap out of it! I bought a large block of beeswax close to 5 years ago at a Farmer’s Market have been using it exclusively for making food wraps. I still have a bunch of it left. For a long time, I only used beeswax and cotton cloth to make them. But since I’ve been using them for a while, I decided to spring for some pine resin to make them more soft and pliable. Here are the finished products! The chicken print ones are new, and I decided to maintain the red and black ones (I made those probably 4 years ago and they still work great with a little touch-up every once in a while).
The chicken print fabric was someones abandoned pillow-making project, and I thought it would be a much better use of fabric to make these! I love how they turned out, and they are HUGE so I can wrap almost anything with them. To wash, either spot clean with a wet cloth, rinse in cool water, or GENTLY (like brushing your teeth gently) clean with cool soapy water. Rinse and air dry. If you take care of them, you’ll have them for a long time!
Bend it and shape it anyway to you please!
Another one of my favorite alternatives (although not plastic-free) to ziploc bags is Kids Konserve reusable food bags and Blue Avocado (Re)Zip bags. You can wrap sandwiches, fruit, snacks, and pretty much anything else with it. I like to freeze fruit (like huckleberries!) in (re)zip bags and it works fantastically. I only have a couple because I have so many jars, and honestly prefer them to the plastic alternative.
So hey, please stop using plastic wrap. If you have a box right now and want to switch to reusables, it’s up to you whether you want to toss it immediately and start using reusables. If it were me, I would keep the box, and use it for emergencies and things like DIY fruit fly traps (which are rampant in my apartment during the summer #vegetarianproblems). To me, it makes more sense to use it up instead of throwing it away unused. But you do you, boo boo! I hope beeswax wrap really makes you… Glad you switched. Terrible.
ANYWAY
Love (and beeswax stains all over the goddamn carpet),
Ollie
Zero Waste Ollie 