Plastic-free products and brands we love

Plastic. It’s all around us. In our homes, in our cars, on the land, in the oceans, in the food we eat, the water we drink, and even in the air we breathe.

It’s hard to deny the usefulness and convenience of plastic. But the more we learn about its dark side, from its blatant strangling and poisoning of animals on land and sea, to its more subtle association with various types of cancer, birth defects, and hormonal dysfunctions in humans, the more we want to limit exposure to this insidious substance whenever possible.

Happily, a growing number of companies feel the same, and offer natural products free of microplastics, synthetic polymers and artificial additives. Shop here to get the absolute best goods for you and the environment, while supporting small businesses with values fully in accord with your own.

We’re sure you’ll love them as much as we do.

Sol Gym: High quality clothing using only natural materials

We love Sol Gym because they really get the Ancient Greek ideal of a sound mind in a sound body. This feisty company offers functional and fantastic-looking athletic shirts, shorts, hoodies and other gear for active men and women. They also take a firm stand against artificial fibers, correctly identifying them as endocrine disruptors: hormonal saboteurs that sap your vitality and fertility, and which don't belong anywhere near your skin.

What’s more, Sol is fighting the good fight on other fronts as well, building a community of strong and capable individuals through their Sol Club, a paid membership program that offers escape-the-Matrix style online classes teaching leadership, responsibility, fitness, and personal financial freedom.

An athletic gear company that wants to keep you healthy, wealthy, wise, and plastic-free. We are all for it.

Sole-Lo: True barefoot design shoes

Sole-Lo really cares about your feet. The founder, having suffered through decades of over-padded athletic shoes and cheap military boots, and the consequent damage to muscles and joints as a consequence, realized that the shoe industry has got it all wrong.

The casualties of modern shoes are plain to see: collapsed arches, weak, atrophied feet, bunions, and lower back pain are just a few consequences of habitually wearing what those in the know wryly call “foot coffins”.

Sole-Lo would like to reverse the harm that the footwear industry has wrought, by offering great-looking, high-quality, plastic-free shoes that will let you go as close to barefoot as possible, without actually baring your feet.

The Grounded Athlete: Handcrafted conductive grounding sandals

If you know your biology, then you understand that all life essentially runs on electricity. You should also know that the human body has evolved to be a natural conductor, channelling electric current between the sky and the earth.

As we have become civilized, however, we have become increasingly insulated from this natural flow of electrons, with our pavement, our buildings, and most notably with our rubber- and plastic-soled shoes.

The Grounded Athlete would like to reverse the harm this has caused, by offering the GAIA sandal, a line of footwear that not only looks and feels fantastic on your feet, but is also specially designed to let you reconnect with the earth’s natural current.

Try on a pair and, like a Jedi, feel the force flowing through you once again.

Biöm: Upgraded oral care products with clean ingredients

Your skin absorbs whatever comes into contact with it, especially the delicate mucous membranes inside the mouth. Which is why we are not a fan of most oral care products like mouthwash and toothpaste, containing as they do a number of highly questionable ingredients such as parabens, sodium lauryl sulfate, and fluoride.

Blöm was started by a dentist and a cosmetic chemist who realized that there were very few products on the market they could recommend to their patients with a clear conscience. So they created their own.

Their flagship product, NOBS toothpaste, is a fluoride-free, plastic- and BPA-free toothpaste in premeasured tablet form, in a glass jar. You’ll always use the right amount, and you’ll never make a mess squeezing paste from a tube. Also, if you are a world traveler, you’ll never get your toothpaste confiscated at airport security again for being over the liquid volume limit.

O’Naturelle—100% grass-fed & finished beef tallow soap

Read the label on most soaps and shampoos on the market, and you’re likely to run into the same ingredients: parabens, phthalates, formaldehyde, sodium lauryl sulfate, and propylene glycol. The effects of these go beyond just getting you clean: at best, they can irritate, and damage your skin. At worst, some are known carcinogens.

You won’t find any of these ingredients, however, in a bar of O’Naturelle pure tallow soap. Made only with tallow rendered from grass-fed and finished beef fat, and either unscented, or scented with essential oils from cedar, pine, rosemary, lavender, and more. This is soap as it used to be for most of human civilization. Soap as it should be, and now is once again.

Sol Scents: Ancient aromas made from all natural ingredients

You may be very conscientious about what you put into your body, but what about what you put onto it? The skin is the largest organ in the body. Just like your digestive tract, it absorbs whatever it comes into contact with, for better or for worse. What toxic, endocrine-disrupting synthetic compounds are in your deodorant, your body spray, and your cologne?

The folks at Sol Scents think you deserve better, and they deliver. Just like its sister companies Sol Gym and Sol Supplements, Sol Scents is adamant that its products be sourced entirely from the natural world, and that they contribute to your health and vitality, rather than rob you of them.

Sol Scents are also formulated to make you feel as good as you smell, with functional elixirs for improved blood flow and mental focus, as well as their core collection designed to uplift the senses. In other words, fragrances for body, mind, and soul.

The VanMan Company: Natural health and wellness products

Plenty of companies are now making it their business to resist Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, and Big Food, but the company leading the vanguard in the fight against Big Toothpaste is VanMan.

Toothpaste is one of the unsung villains in the war on your health, but concealed within that minty freshness are propylene glycol, sodium lauryl sulfate, aspartame, saccharine, fluoride, and parabens, not to mention actual plastic micro particles. No bueno for you, nor for our ocean friends on the other end of the drain.

VanMan’s miracle tooth powder contains none of this crap. It’s made with natural bentonite clay, baking powder, and powdered grass-fed cattle bone, a little ancient sea salt, and natural peppermint oil for flavor.

The company also offers lip balms, skin creams, and hair oils, all of them sourced from natural products, and formulated according to VanMan’s vision of emboldening people around the world to live healthier lives.

We’re not sure if it’s by coincidence or by design, but VanMan seems to have captured both the anti-establishment activist spirit and the back-to nature idealism of the 1960s, and infused it into their company and their products. This is a good thing.

Acorn Bluff Farms: Sustainably raised Mangalitsa pork

The harsh truth: toxic plastic residues are found not only in the air, the water, the land, and the sea, but also in the bacon.

You have probably heard the old saying that “you are what you eat”, and this applies to pigs as well as people. Unfortunately, Big Food seems to be more interested in maximising profits than in protecting your health, so it isn’t too particular about what factory-raised livestock is fed. Plastic wrappers and styrofoam packing are routinely included along with the edible garbage ground up and fed to pigs, whose bodies incorporate these plastic particles into their meat and fat tissues.

Disgusting, we agree.

Well, it doesn’t have to be that way. Acorn Bluff Farms has taken a strong position against plastic contamination in their pork, offering sustainably raised Mangalitsa pork on their heritage farm in Iowa. Mangalitsa has been called the best in the world, described in the same terms (rich, bold, creamy, marbled, umami) commonly used to describe premium wagyu beef. Try it once, and you will never want to put another piece of dry, tasteless, plastic-contaminated supermarket pork in your mouth ever again.

Centenarius Nutrition: Maximum purity nutritional supplements

Centenarius Nutrition describes themselves as “a committed community of health seekers yearning to unlock a long, vibrant, and beautiful life.” The company name implies that staying strong, fit, and attractive even past your hundredth birthday is an attainable goal.

Their commitment to plastic-free products is exemplified in their certified grass-fed whey protein isolate, made from the milk of fully-pastured cows living on small, independent farms in Ireland. This pure protein supplement is also free of heavy metals, soy, hormones, additives, and lactose.

Other products include marine collagen, glycine and creatine, plus an attractive plastic-free, BPA-free, leak-free stainless steel shaker to mix it all up in.

Hestia Tobacco: Craft cigarettes made from American-grown tobacco plants

In Ancient Greek mythology, Hestia was the goddess of hearth and home. Whereas pious Greeks might go and worship Zeus or Aphrodite or any of the other Olympian gods in the various temples, every home, humble or grand, kept a shrine or altar to honor Hestia.

The Hestia Tobacco company similarly honors its namesake goddess, growing the sacred leaf in a natural and environmentally sound manner on their organic farm in South Carolina, and carefully crafting what must be the Platonic ideal of the cigarette. Free from additives, chemicals, or any plastics in its filter or anywhere near the tobacco. Choose either bold and full-bodied Hesper Form, or lighter, mellower Stone Form.

If you happen to enjoy a cigarette every now and then, you can’t do much better than Hestia.

Greco Gum—All: natural chewing gum, made of 100% pure mastic tree sap

If you look at the tiny print on the back of a chewing gum package, you’ll see, right before the list of unpronounceable additives, artificial sweeteners, artificial coloring agents, and artificial colors, an innocuous-looking ingredient, “gum base”.

In fact, gum base could contain any number of unspecified plasticizers, emulsifiers, and toxic petroleum by-products that are more closely related to truck tires and boot soles than to anything you’d want in your mouth.

Thousands of years ago, the Ancient Greeks were chewing gum from the crystallized resin of the mastic tree, which not only freshened their breath and polished their teeth, but also gave them heroically sculpted and chiseled jawlines.

Greco Gum carries on this proud, millennia-old tradition. Unlike the manufactured, artificially flavored plastic chewing gum at the supermarket, a tin of Greco Gum has only one ingredient: 100% pure, organically grown, highest-quality mastic gum direct from the island of Chios.

MASA Chips: Traditional tortilla chips made with beef tallow

About the only thing ordinary tortilla chips have going for them is that they taste great. Everything else about them scares the hell out of us.

From the genetically modified frankencorn used by most manufacturers, to the aflatoxin and other carcinogenic mycotoxins found in most corn, to the cheap polyunsaturated cottonseed, corn, canola oil used to to deep-fry practically every tortilla chip in the world, we’d love to be able to give them up. But they taste so good.

Happily, there are MASA Chips. The only tortilla chips we know of that are made of naturally-grown corn prepared the ancient Aztec way (boiled along with natural minerals to remove the toxins and make the corn more digestible), and then fried in pure grass-fed beef fat for unmatched flavor along with many health benefits.

Tortilla chips that are not only the best you’ve ever tasted, but are also good for you. Packaged, of course, in a plastic-free bag.

Selo Olive Oil: Premium Croatian extra virgin olive oil

In our experience, not everything calling itself “virgin” actually deserves the title.

This is especially true of olive oil. True extra virgin olive oil is cold-pressed, often by hand or mechanical presses, and never extracted using solvents or heat. Its acidity is below the defined legal limit of 0.8 percent.

Where things get cloudy is in places like the United States, where “extra virgin” has no legal definition as it does in Europe. Most of the major olive oil makers shamelessly call their product “extra virgin olive oil” when it is actually only “like a virgin”, having been adulterated with inferior grades of olive oil, plus even cheap refined soybean or canola oils.

This is why we are such big fans of Selo. Selo is a single origin, cold-pressed, unblended and absolutely pure extra virgin olive oil. Made from hand-picked Oblica olives from the Adriatic coast of Dalmatia, a region in Croatia that has produced excellent olive oil since the time of the Roman Empire. Sent to you in a recyclable glass bottle, tinted dark green to protect the precious oil from light.

Sela is so good you’ll want to use it in everything: drizzle it on salads, on bread, on meat, even in your coffee! Or do as the Croatians: rub it into your skin and comb it through your hair.

Pick up a bottle of Selo, and discover what extra virgin olive oil is actually supposed to be.

Sol Supplements: Clean and effective supplements without any of the garbage

By now you may have noticed a pattern: we love Sol Gym, we love Sol Scents, so it should come as no surprise that we’ve found Sol Supps equally deserving of our affection.

Not only for their devotion to providing the cleanest, highest-quality, and effective supplements possible, but also for their almost fanatical commitment to keeping unnecessary preservatives, contaminants, and other “garbage” out of their supps.

We admire them for not taking the easy, wrong way. Unlike so many supplement companies who race overseas to scrape the bottom of the ingredient bargain barrels to maximize profit margins, Sol Supplements manufactures and sources its materials in the United States or other countries where standards of quality and safety actually matter.

They don’t compromise. Why should you?

Vera Salt: Pure plastic-free salt harvested from natural spring water

Every day countless gallons of water enter the ocean, carrying with it tons of microplastic residue. While a lot of it is dust blown from our eroding plastic cities, along with millions of tires shedding synthetic rubber, washed into the sewers by rainwater, most of the microplastic gunk actually comes from synthetic fibers: lint in the wastewater of billions of loads of nylon and polyester laundry. It all ends up in the oceans, which are where most people get their salt.

If you’d rather not season your food with powdered truck tires and polyester lint, try Vera Salt. Sourced from an ancient saltwater spring so pure it’s never even heard of plastic, let alone touched it, this excellent, delicious salt is dried in the sun, harvested by hand, and sent to you, naturally, in a plastic-free container.

Kindred Harvest Company: Organic tea blends and wild-sourced honey

Kindred Harvest takes the words “organic” and “natural” very seriously. This company goes far beyond even the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s standards for organic certification, making sure that their teas and honeys contain only organic ingredients free from heavy metals and other contaminants, and keeping any synthetic glues, plastics, or other toxic materials out of their products and packaging.

Choose from a variety of green and black whole leaf teas, plus a selection of caffeine-free herbal blends, all prepared in special biodegradable pyramid-shaped tea pouches with no glue or ink used on the string or tag.

BVLL Global: Everyday products made from real materials

We’ve mentioned elsewhere how plastic in your food or drink, against your skin, or inhaled into your lungs can act as an endocrine disruptor, interfering with your body’s healthy hormone production and causing all sorts of health problems.

BVLL Global cuts right through the bull, telling it straight: “consuming plastic can make you sick, fat, ugly, and infertile”. We see plastic water bottles in the hands of people everywhere, including more than a few who answer the description above, so clearly not everyone yet has gotten the message.

If plastic is a pandemic, then BVLL Global is part of the cure, offering a great-looking black-and-silver stainless steel sport water bottle for microplastic-free hydration. While we cannot guarantee that using their product will turn you into a healthy, ripped, handsome stud, it certainly couldn’t hurt.

The Woolshire: Handmade pillows with 100% US grown organic cotton and wool

Imagine spending up to eight hours every day of your life, with your face pressed into a mass of toxic petroleum distillates and flame-retardant chemicals, breathing in noxious fumes which altered your body chemistry, disrupted your hormones, and increased your risk of cancer?

Sounds pretty horrific, but if you sleep on a “memory foam” or other synthetic pillow, that’s exactly what you’re doing.

The Woolshire has a better alternative. Check out their fantastic line of pillows for people of all ages, made from 100 percent organic Idaho-raised wool and Texas-grown cotton. You’ll spend up to a third of your life with your head on a pillow. Best to choose one made with your good health in mind.

Think we missed someone? Reach out to us on Twitter or Instagram and tell us who we should add to the list.

This article originally appeared online in 2023; it was most recently updated on December 12, 2023, to include current information.

David St John

David St John has been a soldier, teacher, fitness coach, consultant, wilderness instructor, and an award-winning copywriter; equally at home in the jungles of Burma and Sumatra, and the corporate jungles of Singapore and Osaka.