Plastic-Free July is a good time to look at the small things we reach for every day.
The lip balm in your bag.
The soap by the sink.
The things that touch your skin, your mouth, your body — and somehow still come wrapped in plastic.
For our next Plastic-Free July Founder Pick, we caught up with Callie, Co-Founder of No Tox Life — a mother-daughter brand making clean, low-waste body and home care.
Your mom Sandee had the “I can’t read a single ingredient on this shampoo bottle” moment that started everything. What was your turning point — the moment you decided to go all-in on No Tox Life with her?
I was working at a company that didn’t align with my values and wanted to make a change. I already thought she had a great idea with the business and was helping each weekend with sales and designing packaging, photography, etc. No Tox Life wasn’t making enough money to replace my salary but I asked my mom if she wanted to go in on a partnership and she said we could try it out, and see how it would work. So I quit my job in a leap of faith and decided to go all in. We worked 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, for years, to finally make it successful and bring it to the level it’s at today.
Of everything in No Tox Life’s lineup, what made the lip butter the one you wanted in our customers’ hands this July?
Everyone knows “chapstick” but most lip balm is oily, dries your lips out, or contains ingredients you’d rather not be eating every day. We made this buttery and long-lasting so it’s a bit harder than a normal lip balm but it lasts for hours on the lips and you don’t have to constantly reapply. It’s made with a mild vanilla flavor with all ingredients transparently disclosed.
Most lip butters use beeswax. You went candelilla instead, kept it fully plant-based, and packaged it in a paperboard tube that home-composts. Walk us through that decision — what wouldn’t you compromise on, and what was harder than you expected to pull off?
We were vegan for 10 years so it made sense to make vegan products. Candelilla is from a waxy plant and makes a great alternative to beeswax, it’s not exactly the same but with the right formula tweaking it can work. On the paperboard tube, we had a lot of trouble with earlier iterations that got too smudged and frankly were way too large (who wants a lip balm that is 5 years old because it lasts so long?). We spent a long time designing the tube to be functional and aesthetically pleasing, so people want to use it whether they are focused on plastic reduction or not.
For someone just starting to phase plastic out of their daily routine, where would you tell them to begin?
A simple change is stop grabbing plastic bags in the produce section at the grocery store. Just put raw vegetables into your basket. You’re going to wash them anyway at home. I stopped using the plastic produce bags years ago and save at least a couple hundred bags a year from going to the landfill. Pro tip, use dish soap to wash dirty veggies. I use the DISH BLOCK® dish soap (No Tox Life) to wash all my veggies. I use the unscented one, it rinses clean and is a gentle soap.
What’s a plastic problem you haven’t cracked yet but really want to?
Our deodorant is water-based and glides on, so the refill tubes we make have plastic. Paper gets soggy, wet and moldy if you put water-based things in it.
So far haven’t found tubes that will hold up to water based formulas without plastic. The metal versions are also extraordinarily expensive and not practical for retail pricing. So we are continuing to work on alternatives! The refills we do make reduce plastic usage by 70% but it’s not perfect.
Stacy’s take
No Tox Life’s lip butter is exactly the kind of tiny daily swap we love: easy, useful, and not secretly annoying.
It feels nourishing without being sticky. It’s fully plastic-free. And it’s made with clean ingredients for something that goes right on your lips.
Soft, simple, good. <3