'Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not.'- Dr Seuss
We are big believers that every company should take responsibility for their own waste. Doing so, forces product designers to consider the most important principle of waste management; how to reduce it as much as possible.
Every year as we grow, we are astounded by how much waste is prevented by two simple design changes: Making our product a concentrate, and then switching single use plastic bottles for dispenser bottles, replenished by refill packs.
We use 90% less plastic (*1) than our supermarket competitors.
We’re now selling over 1.5 million ‘loads’ (*2) of laundry products every month. If everyone who purchased from us had instead purchased a supermarket bottle, sprayer or jar - the difference would be pretty astounding.
In conventional supermarket formats (*3), delivering this many loads of laundry products would have consumed about 4 tonnes of plastic per month.
Using our system, we used just 352kg on average.
This is an annual savings of 46 tonnes. That's before you include the Refill, Return program.
Never underestimate the value of reduction.
(1) Based on an average competitor grams/load of 4.42 for laundry liquids, 1.63 for booster and 0.375 for stain removers
(2) A load is considered either a laundry load (based on package recommendations), a booster soak or pretreat (based on package recommendations) or a stain treatment (based on 2.1mls per treatment)
(3) Competitors tested were OMO Laundry Liquid (2L bottle, 40 loads), Dynamo Laundry Liquid (1.8L bottle, 36 loads), Earth Choice Laundry Liquid (2L, 40 loads), Sards Stain Remover (420ml bottle, 200 stains), Napisan (1kg jar, 33 loads)
(4) Assumes every reused refill pack that was sold was instead a new pack of the same dosage
Our 3-step Refill, Return program helps us further reduce this number down.
Without the program, we would have used an average of 352kg to deliver our 1.5+ million loads of laundry monthly (*4).
With the program, we reduced this number by a further 113kg per month on average.
We expect this number to continue to grow, because the percentage of refill packs on their second life also grew - from mid-teens to mid-thirties as some of our newer products start to enter their second-life phase.
The amount of Reused, Refill Packs we ship depends on a number of factors.
The most important one, is how old the product is. We only launched our Fabric Spray in January, so we don’t have enough returns to set up a sustainable supply of second life refills yet.
On the other hand, our Original Laundry Detergent Bulk Refill packs are generally only limited by people’s preference for choosing new packs (with the exception of a few months when we were renovating).
In our top month, 86% of Laundry Detergent Bulk Refill Packs were Second Life.
Finally, the quality of the Refill Pack also impacts our ability to reuse them.
Occasionally, we have entire batches of Refill Packs that are known to cause issues through the return program. With these, we shred them, and turn them into Powder Scoops.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.
We made some huge leaps in our numbers in FY24 (and even our reporting).
We can't wait to share with you the progress over the next 3 years, as we work toward 50% or greater return numbers.