An Easy DIY Scrub Brush (Plus Thoughts on Indigenous Knowledge and Third Options)

Like most small-but-not-everyday purchases in my life, I had been putting off buying a heavy-duty scrub brush for a long time.

Sure, we could use one— the soap scum on the tub was building at an alarming rate, and some of my cookware was accumulating grime that the ordinary scrub brushes we had couldn't touch— but as soon as I thought about buying one, I froze up.

Yes, you can buy them for like two bucks at Walmart. But they're made of plastic, and they'll exist for another thousand years cluttering up the landfill, and who knows what kind of ungodly working conditions the factory that makes them has, and… it doesn't take much for any purchase to send me down a vortex of ecological anxiety. 

So I looked into eco-friendly options. Bamboo handles and boar bristles called to me. But they were more expensive and needed to be ordered online, and would they actually work? It turns out that the stress of trying to make a decision outweighed the need for a plastic scrub brush, so I didn't buy one. For, like, the last two years.

Then, while out for a walk a couple weeks ago, I looked at the horsetails growing alongside the trail, and I remembered reading about how Native Americans in this region used this prehistoric plant for scouring pots and polishing arrowheads. So I picked a few and took them home to try out.

I took a reed, bunched it into a ball, and scrubbed my cast iron with it— and it was amazing. I went on a horsetail binge, scouring grime and soot off pot bottoms, getting stubborn bits off the counter, and yes, scrubbing all the soap scum out of our bathtub, leaving it sparkling. By that time the reeds were pretty worn out, so I dropped them into the compost pile.

The material was free and sustainable to collect (horsetail can grow back, and I also plan to take some rhizome cuttings in the spring to propagate it elsewhere), it was very effective to use, and when I was done with it, I simply gave it back to the earth.

Some thoughts about this:

First of all, I am learning that when I have a need, I should look first to indigenous knowledge. People living in this region used just the materials around them to provide for nearly all of their needs, and many of those resources are still available to us. Instead of turning the modern perspective of buying something to meet a need, I can first learn how people provided for that need before money, and see if that's something I can try.

Secondly, in life and especially in our sustainability efforts, we need to learn to look for the third option. We too easily lock ourselves into two choices and agonize over them. Cheap plastic brush or expensive bamboo brush? Perhaps the answer is neither. Perhaps there is a third option you can consider, or a way to opt out altogether. 

In the meantime, I've been harvesting horsetail every couple of weeks and using it for my toughest scrubbing jobs. You never know what incredibly useful plants are growing nearby, waiting to be used the way that they were used for thousands of years before we came along with our newfangled technology. Knowledge is power!

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