As you know, we’re constantly working to make our packaging and sustainability credentials better than ever. That means lots of learning, testing and adapting as we go. You may have seen our last post on our attempt to make our refill packs out of recycled plastic on social media.
Well, here’s the low-down on where we’re at now.
Our recycled plastic Bulk Refill Packs are simply not strong enough to handle the necessary wear and tear on their journey from us to you. Recycled plastic is a degraded plastic, and 3L is a lot to contain in sub-par strength plastic. We can't use this small batch at all, so instead we're using it as material for our recycling experiments in our office (more to come).
Our regular sized recycled plastic Refill Packs fare a lot better than the Bulks, but we're not confident how many lives we'll be able to get out of them. We are still working through finding a material balance.
We WILL be using these packs because the absolute worst thing that we can imagine would be that these perfectly fine packs don’t get used at all and will get 0 lives.
But we ask that you bear with us as we work out if, and how many times we can use them again. We can't guarantee anything.
In parallel we have also created regular plastic Refill and Bulk Packs that are even more robust than our old aluminium packs.
They minimise plastic packaging quantity by up to 90%, and ARE (we're sure) robust enough (hurrah) to make it through sanitisation again and again and again, which is exactly what we want.
These packs are our primary focus and will be our main solution in the immediate term.
In terms of what you’ll be receiving: it will most likely be some of our super strong regular refill packs, but it might be a mix with Refill Packs made from recycled plastic.
If you receive a recycled refill pack (there will be a sticker on them letting you know), please hold on to them if you're not in a hurry, send them back if you've got others you want to return, or recycle them with the soft plastics, if you already do that.
We'll update you on what happens to them back here as time goes on. ✌️
