With the New Year comes the January sales, which we’re all guilty of surfing to try and find a bargain. However, not all products are created equal, and they’re certainly not all environmentally friendly, both in the product itself and the way in which it is handled.

After a few weeks of visiting family, over-indulging on food and drink, and having fun, your skin may not be at its best. It’s always tempting to buy a new face scrub, lather up, and watch your complexion return to its former beauty. However, next time you buy a face wash, watch out for ones with plastic beads: as many as 94,500 beads can be released into the water system every time you wash your face.

Releasing toxic chemicals into the food chain
These ‘microbeads’ may look harmless, but they are too small to be filtered out by regular sewage works and are therefore released into the ocean, where they are accidentally swallowed by marine life. Once swallowed, they can release toxic chemicals into the food chain. Seafood bought in supermarkets may well have swallowed these beads, and then the chemicals make it into our system too.

Similarly, maybe there’s a new top that you’ve seen in the sales that you think is gorgeous. Before you buy it, check the materials: if it is made from polyester, rayon or nylon, you may want to consider putting it back. Polyester production requires twice the energy than the same yield of cotton and uses harmful chemicals to do so, which have the potential to get into water and air untreated. Furthermore, nearly 70 billion barrels of oil are used to produce polyester each year, which is another huge drain on our resources. Nylon uses three times the energy that cotton does and is non-biodegradable, meaning it will continue to persist indefinitely.

Be aware of the impact of online shopping
You may think that by ordering online – eliminating the necessity to go into the town centre in a car which burns through petrol quickly – you may be doing the environment a favour. In contrast, online shopping purchases cause an increase in travel time, traffic delays and vehicle emissions of everybody on the road, as they cause more congestion on already busy roads, and also emit large amounts of particulates into the air.

Hypothetically, if all shopping were to happen online, this would eradicate the demand for actual stores with their central heating and air conditioning, but in fact, the amount of time we spend in physical stores also has not decreased.

So when you hit the sales this January, remember to put your efforts into finding environmentally friendly products that have less of an impact on our wildlife and planet.