This year, I am buying everyone a ball for Christmas. And I am crazy excited about it.

I am buying everybody a Cora ball.

Now, I hate to spoil the surprise, but if you want to buy someone a physical gift OR a gift that could actually help save our planet, I can't think of anything better. I am not making any money off this post, I am really just this excited about the idea.

So what the heck is one of these things?

Cora Ball's go in your washing machine with every load of laundry. They suck up the microfiber plastic waste that is shedding off your clothes, into the machine, and out into our water sources. We know now that all of these tiny fibers, the size of one piece of glitter, are a massive problem for our oceans and our bodies. You can read all about it here.

We now ingest about a credit card's worth of plastic a month; most of that is plastic shed off in clothing. It's too small to notice, but we can see it adds up. When you consider that there are connections between plastics and hormonal problems, endocrine issues, and even cancer, those tiny shreds off our leggings become a big deal.

There's a ton of responsibility to go around for this, and most of it is clothing manufacturers' faults. There should not be plastic-based synthetic clothes on the market. There should also be a filter in every single washing machine to keep these microfibers out of our water.  Your washing machine manufacturer could solve this problem, but we have to let them know we notice.

A couple of products- the Cora Ball and the Guppyfriend bag are the ones I hear about the most (but they aren't the only ones by far)- will do the work of a filter and trap microplastics before they hit our water sources.

If every washing machine had one of these in it, it could dramatically decrease the amount of plastic dumped into our water on a daily basis. But for that to work, it would have to become as normal as detergent or dryer sheets.

So this year, I am buying these for everybody. My plan is basically to buy a bunch in bulk and hand them out. If everyone who cared about the environment gave one of these filter products as gifts (or even just bought one for themselves), we could take a huge chunk out of this real and terrifying problem.

In most cases, I don't think we can buy our way out of environmental problems, and I don't think this will solve it completely, but I think we can slow down the dump of plastic into our water, and this is one way to do it. We can't control what our family and friends choose for clothing (so we can't keep plastic out of their wardrobes- they may just love leggings), but we can help them EASILY keep that plastic out of waterways.

So what the heck do you write in a card when giving a weird gift like this?

1. Wish them a happy holiday
2. Acknowledge this is a really weird gift.
3. Explain what it is. Let them know they are eating credit cards worth of plastic.
4. Explain how easy it is to throw it in your laundry.
5. Talk about how you love them (and maybe how it's cool to be on the planet-saving team with them).

If you think it's a particularly hard sell, tell them it makes laundry softer too or something. Kidding. Sort of.

Will you get some weird looks? Oh definitely, but it will be memorable. If you have any particularly tough family members who you know won't use it, then skip them. But if you think just maybe, your loved one could make use of that ball, then it is a gift for everyone, not just the individual. It is also a gift to them because they get the warm fuzzy feeling of doing something good without investing any time or money. That's pretty awesome.


So, it's a weird one, but it is totally my plan. What gifts have you given that are good for the environment? What are you excited to gift this year?