Our plastic use (and everything we’re doing about it…)

We’re living in the ‘anthropocene’ — the epoch in which human activities have come to dominate the planet. And years from now our descendants will know precisely when it started by looking at the layers of plastic in the fossil record.

It’s not a legacy any of us want to leave. It’s not something we’re personally comfortable with and we know you’re not either.

But what can we do about it?

We wish we had the answer. Instead, what we do have are lots of half answers. Measures that we hope add up to something meaningful, whilst forever continuing our search for better, truer solutions.

Plastic-free bottles

The most obvious solution to the plastic problem is using plastic-free products. That’s why we’ve introduced our 500ml aluminium bottles, which are 100% recycled and infinitely recyclable – and we plan to extend our aluminium offering to other products in other sizes soon. The great thing about aluminium is not only that it's recyclable, but that it's actually widely recycled. Whereas EU recycling rates for plastic stand at around 9%, they're roughly 86% for aluminium – an aluminium drinks can is often recycled and back on the shelf as a new can within 60 days!

We offer these bottles both with or without a (plastic) pump. If you include the pump on your first purchase, you can wash it and reuse it for every subsequent purchase – which can then instead be ordered with an aluminium cap.

On carbon footprints, we’ve done everything we can to keep the carbon embodied in these bottles as low as possible – that’s why using 100% recycled aluminium is so important. Our research showed that using recycled aluminium reduces the carbon footprint by 90%. Once produced, the aluminium bottle's footprint is 1.7x greater than our 400ml plastic equivalent – but by refilling it just once, the carbon per use becomes less than the plastic bottle.

Plastic-free bars

As well as plastic-free bottles, we also offer many of our products as solid bars. Our shampoo bars and soaps are all entirely plastic-free and we even offer a plastic-free shampoo bar for dogs!

We really love our zero waste bars and we can imagine (/hope for!) a day when they become the norm. But we’re not there yet. So, when you’re ready for them, we’ve got them.

Until then, we’ll keep trying to tackle the plastic problem in as many other ways as we can too.

Recycled plastic

In trying not to use plastic, one of the most effective solutions is simply not to use any new plastic. There is so much of the stuff already out there, it’s almost irresponsible not to use it.

Our standard (400ml) sized bottles have been 100% recycled plastic since 1999 – long before most other companies got on board (though we’re not so interested in point-scoring here as actually getting something done about the problem).

Our newest bottles are also 5g lighter than our old bottles (hooray!), because the grams add up to kilos pretty quickly. (Fun fact: in an attempt to use as little plastic as possible, we once made our bottles so thin they all fell over. Hmmmm…)

Our bigger, refill-sized bottles are unfortunately a little more complex. We’ve tried to make them out of 100% recycled plastic, but they just weren’t strong enough to hold the higher volume of liquid, and they cracked. This means that we’ve successfully managed to get 35% recycled PET (RPET) into our 5-litre bottles, but upping this percent is a challenge. It’s something we really want to change, and an ongoing journey. We’re conducting a rolling programme of research into how to increase the percentage of PCR (post-consumer recycled) plastic in our refills. These bottles still save a LOT of plastic compared to their smaller counterparts (more on that below). One day, we hope we’ll find a way for them to be 100% recycled and still do the job they’re supposed to do! In the meantime, we’re (constantly) working on it, but we do have to use virgin plastic for our 20-litre bottles.

As for caps and pumps, these are always a bit tricky. Often the problem with caps is that recycled plastic is more brittle than virgin plastic so recycled caps snap. Likewise, pumps often have metal springs inside them, making them non-recyclable (unless you pull the pump apart).

But if you're thinking our caps and pumps look a little... weird (!), it’s because we’ve switched to the most widely recyclable solutions we can. The new pumps are free from metal springs and the new caps lock closed, meaning we don’t need to ‘under-seal’ the bottle with yet another piece of (non-recyclable) plastic-coated metal.

Gosh, it’s complicated, isn’t it?

Refill

You might have noticed that our bottles have ‘Recycling is good, refilling is better’ embossed around their tops. Fundamentally, we believe the thing that’s going to have the biggest impact on plastic outputs is behaviour change. Alongside switching to either aluminium bottles or solid bars (see above), the other big change that makes an even bigger difference is refill – something we try to make as easy as possible for you.

Our bigger bottles come in 2.5-litre, 5-litre and 20-litre sizes and each one uses substantially less plastic than the equivalent number of smaller bottles that contain the same amount of liquid.

To put it in numbers, sales of our bigger bottles over the last 5 years have meant a saving of 92,790 kilos of plastic had that same product instead been sold in smaller bottles. That’s equivalent to over 7 London buses or 618,600 avocados. Holy guacamole!

When your refills are empty, you can reuse them around the home, or send them back to us for us to recycle. Lots of people ask us why we don’t just refill returned refills with new products to sell again. It’s a fair question, and a great idea – but we’ve found that no matter how well we wash our used refills, they don’t pass our microbial tests for suitability to be used again. 100% natural origin aromas are strong, and they cling to the plastic. A small number of the refills you return to us are kept for use in these tests, but the rest are recycled through our waste partners. 100% of the bottles we send to them are recycled, but only 12% of plastic that is disposed of via household recycling bins is actually recycled – so it’s definitely better to return your used refills to us than chuck them in your plastics bin at home.

We’d love to close the loop eventually and reuse our refill bottles time and time again. Until we get to that point, the best way to reduce your plastic use with our liquid products is to refill at one of our many refill stockists around the country.

Other materials

Yep, the other obvious way to use less plastic is to use other materials. And our new aluminium range is a great start. We’ve looked far and wide for other materials that keep our products as affordable as possible, whilst offering genuinely sustainable solutions.

Unfortunately, glass is a bit smashy in bathrooms (which are often tiled and full of hard surfaces). Those bag in a box cartons? Not as great as you’d think as the inner liner is virgin plastic because recycled plastic is too brittle. Then once the liner is empty, you’re left with a soft plastic bag which is less widely recycled than solid plastic bottles. We’ve seen paper bottles too, though they also come with hidden plastic liners. And bio-plastics require landmass to grow whichever crop is used to produce the plastic — which, ultimately, still ends up as plastic. Bio-plastics are also very hard to recycle, and require specialist recycling equipment that most household recyclers don’t have.

On materials in general, it’s not just the material itself that is the problem but our attitude towards it. If we just switch to alternatives (say, bamboo) but then use it in exactly the same way we use plastic, we’ll chop down every last tree in order to grow it. So, whatever the material, the key is that we reuse it. That’s why we’ve sent nothing to landfill for five years.

In summary…

What can we say? Only that in years to come, when our descendants do stumble upon that layer of plastic in their fossil records, we hope it will be so thin that it’s seen to have passed in a comparative blink of an eye.

It’s a dream we’re all working hard towards and we’ll keep you updated all the way.

 

 

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