How Waterbody celebrates Earth Day every day (and how you can too!)
We celebrate Earth Day this week – just as the green willow buds are bursting forth in their glorious debut and the robins are sing-songing all over the neighborhood. It’s a beautiful time of year to consider what we love about this earthly home of ours, and to check in on how we’re taking care of this place.
At Waterbody, nature is part and parcel of every single thing we do. Our products are help you weave the healing magic of nature into your every day life, and remind you of your place in the heart of our wild and wonderful world. We are in nature, and nature is in us. And just as our mother Earth wraps her big arms brimming with fresh air, clean water, wild foods, and abundant beauty around us, it is our job to return the favor by being good stewards of our lands and waters.
Waterbody is founded on a commitment to celebrating and stewarding our planet. Here’s how we practice these values every day, and how you can too!
Get outside
Every product in the Waterbody body care line is inspired by time spent outdoors, exploring wild places. Our skincare is created with foraged ingredients – nutrient-packed wild plants harvested by hand sustainably, to encourage continued growth and thriving native plant communities. To make your soap, butters, and balms I take to the forest with twigs in my hair, slop through wet squishy muskegs, and comb along briny beaches. Our products are made from Alaska’s wild nature, to share this place with you.
So take yourself out. Get your hands dirty. Learn the names of the plants growing in the back yard. Plant a seed or a whole garden. Listen to a bird. Take a hike. Get to know the world outside your door. The single most impactful way to love and appreciate the natural world is to submerse yourself in it. To build a relationship with nature, and remember all the ways in which you are inextricably connected to it.
Strive to waste less
By now, we’re all well aware of the impacts our waste stream have on our natural resources. Clogged waterways, immense plastic pollution, overflowing landfills; all of it does damage to our environment. Carefully examining what we consume and taking mindful steps to reduce the waste we produce will make a huge difference in mitigating the impacts of waste in our world.
The simplest way to work on wasting less is to follow three tenets of waste reduction: Reduce, reuse, recycle.
At the Waterbody workshop, we reduce our waste production by purchasing in bulk quantities those supplies and ingredients we can’t gather locally. We save and reuse nearly all of the shipping materials that pass through our production process. You’ll often find biodegradable packing peanuts in your orders, or compostable paper packing. All of our spent herbs and plant material waste get composted (in partnership with our local florist friend!) and turned back into nutrient rich soil for our gardens.
Reduce the waste you produce by reducing what you consume. Look for multi-use products to replace the single-use products in your life. A single Waterbody bar soap can effectively swap out hand soap, body wash, and shampoo in your bathroom. The Calm Balm moisturizes lips, hands, face, cuticles and skin over the whole body in a single biodegradable package.
Reuse containers and packaging to give them second or third lives, and to reduce the need to purchase additional new items. Bath salts jars make excellent small planter pots for succulents and herbs. They can also help organize your junk drawer, holding miscellaneous screws or rubber bands.
Recycle packaging that cannot be reused in other areas of your home. Waterbody has been working to transition away from all plastic packaging. Our jars and tins are completely recyclable, and both our soap boxes and lip balm tubes can be composted!
Take an active role in protecting the places we love
Being a good steward of our Earth requires us to stay engaged in protecting and taking care of our lands and waters.
To keep our local green spaces clean, healthy, and accessible for our whole community, Waterbody donates 1% of profits quarterly to Wrangell Parks and Recreation’s Helping Our Parks Program.
These donations support access to Wrangell’s local parks and green spaces in two ways:
- P&R’s Helping Our Parks program brings community members together to cleanup and maintain local parks and trails.
- The Fee Assistance Program offers scholarships for community members to participate in outdoor programming that connects kids to their local environment.
Tangible acts like picking up litter on your block of the street or participating in a community beach cleanup are super impactful ways to play an active part in caring for your corner of the world.
Look for nonprofit organizations in your region that work to support sustainable communities or conservation of the wild places you love, and if you have the resources, donate to keep their work going or volunteer to help on a project.
Research and vote for elected leaders that value the protection and sustainable use of our natural resources. And vote with your hard-earned dollars, to shop with and support those businesses that remain committed to taking good care of the environment.
