Looking around my bathroom a few years ago, I noticed two things. Almost everything came in a plastic container. And despite being labeled soap, conditioner or shampoo, most products’ first ingredient was water.
Why was I spending so much money on plastic containers filled with water rather than the active ingredients? I began rethinking the contents of my bathroom. Plastic Popcorn Bucket
The first thing to go was my shaving kit. Instead of shaving gel, I sprung for shaving soap pucks. While slightly more expensive up front, I got a closer, smoother shave with my stainless steel safety razor.
Then I started thinking about lotions, conditioners and creams in the bathroom. Most were once sold as powders, tablets and concentrates. But as plastics became more popular, adding water and repackaging personal care products in bigger containers became far cheaper and more convenient for manufacturers, creating a lot more waste.
“No one really asked for plastics,” says Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics and a former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency. “We’re spending a lot of money and a lot of greenhouse gas emissions shipping water all around the world.”
As customer demand shifts, and single-use plastic bans loom, manufacturers are now racing to reformulate their products. In the process, customers are rediscovering the appeal of earlier formulations for home and personal care products.
Once limited to co-ops or health food stores, these products are now appearing in the aisles at Target and Walmart. So I gave them a try. Here’s why they’re worth a look.
For centuries, humanity mostly relied on glass, metal, wood and ceramics to ship things around. That had drawbacks. Shipping small, individually sized foods and liquids was often expensive. For some products, it was impossible to do economically.
Single-use plastic changed this. After growing explosively during World War II, the plastics industry repurposed itself to serve the booming consumer economy. Plastics were durable, light, cheap, endlessly versatile — and disposable. Extraordinarily cheap and convenient plastic packaging including cellophane and bubble wrap quickly became the preferred way to ship goods. Today, global production of plastic exceeds 450 million metric tons, roughly 122 pounds for every person on the planet every year, and growing.
It has also made a colossal mess. Plastics are everywhere, including inside us. The typical person ingests considerable quantities of microplastics as the material breaks down into ever-smaller particles — as much as 5 grams, or about a credit card’s worth, per week, according to one estimate from the World Wildlife Federation. Scientists are finding microplastics throughout our bodies, including in breastmilk and brain tissue.
And so far, plastic recycling remains mostly aspirational. Just 9 percent of the world’s plastic waste was recycled in 2019, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In the United States, only about 4 percent of plastic ever lands in a recycling bin, a number that is declining as more is landfilled, burned or tossed as litter. Nearly half of this plastic waste is packaging.
Stéphanie Regni was frustrated by the disposable plastics surrounding her at the grocery store, so she would drive for miles to refill reusable containers at a co-op in San Francisco.
But she wanted to find a way to make zero-waste shopping easier. So in 2016, she founded Fillgood, a store focused on reducing single-use plastics from home, bath and body products. Many of her products are powders, pellets and concentrates. They come in minimal paper packaging because removing water from the products eliminated the need for containers. For liquids, customers can refill from 30-gallon drums that are sent back to the distributor.
Fillgood’s primary customers were once zero-waste fans like Regni. But today, a new demographic is coming into her store in Berkeley, Calif.: “People that have never heard of zero-waste stores,” she says.
How much waste does this save? It varies by product. Shampoo bars replace two to three bottles of liquid shampoo, 552 million of which end up in landfills each year, estimates Johnson & Johnson. For concentrates, Unilever, one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, says its dilute-at-home laundry detergent, a 6x concentrate, uses 70 percent less plastic and reduces distribution emissions by 83 percent — although most emissions come from materials.
Not all the early formulations Regni sourced worked well. “We’ve had some ups and downs,” she says. For example, many shampoo bars without cleansing agents known as surfactants are essentially soap and too acidic for hair, leaving people with bad experiences.
But over the past few years, she says, more large and small brands have introduced no-waste products that rival or even outperform conventional formulations at competitive prices. Regni estimates since 2016 these have helped her customers avoid 200,000 plastic containers.
“People are not going to transition to products that are not as good and efficient. If it doesn’t work as well, it’s not going to work out.”
In my home, I went product by product: toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner and even liquid hand soap. For each one, I found dozens of mostly plastic- and water-free alternatives.
The experience wasn’t always the same, but I found these products performed just as well, only differently — with none of the waste.
Toothpaste tablets, for example, took some getting used to. They need a few seconds to dissolve in your mouth before they work like the tube-dispensed stuff you know. Toothpaste tablets from unPaste, for example, sell for about $10 for a two-month supply and come in various flavors. That made ditching the old tube easy.
I tried a few shower bars and landed on Sustainabar’s shampoo and conditioner. It works great on my (admittedly low-maintenance) hair. One $10 bar lasts about 80 washes, equivalent to two bottles of commercial shampoo. It lathers and cleans exactly like the standard shampoo I used previously. The conditioner leaves my hair soft and without residue, not unlike the expensive, salon-brand formulas I’ve tried.
I also felt silly buying a new bottle of hand soap every time I ran out. So I ordered refill tablets from Blueland, a fast-growing company founded in 2019 that says it has sold more than 10 million nontoxic products. The tablets are designed to be dropped into a reusable dispenser, which is then filled with water.
Some products were more expensive upfront, but many paid for themselves over time.
Did I miss the convenience of plastic? No. The experience wasn’t worse — just slightly different. And I discovered other conveniences. Since most concentrates or solids come as low-cost subscriptions, I took the standard items off my in-person shopping list. The products arrive at my doorstep just a few times per year, and they’re easy to store in compact spaces. Eventually, I’ll try replacing almost all my household products with these new formulations.
Will these products be enough to change the market? Perhaps. But regulation will probably be needed to make plastic-free the default option.
Traditional manufacturers enjoy a nearly endless supply of cheap plastics, along with enormous economies of scale. The fracking boom in the United States produces huge amounts of ethane, one of plastic’s chemical building blocks. Billions of dollars have been invested to turn it into packaging. Robin Waters at the data and analytics firm IHS Markit, told Yale Environment 360 that unless plastic production slows, “they’ll just find something else to wrap in plastic.”
But manufacturers are being forced to find alternatives — or pay for the problem. Colorado, Maine, Oregon and California have all passed extended producer responsibility programs requiring manufacturers or other responsible parties to collect, recycle and manage their packaging, similar to programs that now cover paint, carpets, batteries and mattresses. More than a dozen other states are considering such programs. One of the most ambitious, in Washington state, requires 90 percent of packaging materials to be reused or recycled by 2040.
Manufacturers have responded by reworking their products and packaging with biodegradable plastics, fiber- and paper-based materials, and creating formulas without water.
But unless they can match today’s performance — grab a bottle at the store, bring it home, use it and toss it — the new stuff is a hard sell. Cost and convenience favor plastics, says Muhammad Rabnawaz, an associate professor at the Michigan State University School of Packaging. “Right now, companies are going in every direction,” he says. “We got used to convenience, and the customer doesn’t want to let it go.”
Plastic Gas Tank Yet the definition of convenience may change. It’s inconvenient, after all, for microscopic remains of toothpaste tubes and shampoo bottles to infuse the air we breathe, the water we drink and even our bodies. Or to stoke climate change merely by buying soap.