The anti-plastic movement is coming
for your bathroom
Modern life runs on plastic. When you become aware of the large
quantities of plastic washing into the ocean, choking marine animals, you
suddenly start seeing the material everywhere: It envelopes the food in our
kitchen, it is shaped into animals and building blocks in our children’s
nurseries, it’s in our shower curtains.
But there’s a small movement brewing among designers and
entrepreneurs to cut out single-use plastic from the products we use every day.
And over the past month, we’ve seen how they are coming for our bathrooms.
Last year, a startup called Myro enlisted the help of two
industrial designers from a firm called Visibility to create a deodorant system
that also includes a reusable case, in which you insert new pods. Just last
week, a brand called By Humankind launched with the goal of ridding personal
care products of single-use plastic. It debuted with three items: Shampoo that
is cold-pressed into a bar, mouthwash tablets that you mix with water, and a
deodorant that comes in a reusable container. By Humankind received $4 million
in seed funding led by Lerer Hippeau, signaling that VCs believe there’s the
potential for an anti-plastic brand to scale quickly.
And it’s not just startups that are working toward cleansing your
bathroom of plastic. My colleague Adele Peters recently reported on an exciting
and ambitious effort by a coalition of giant conglomerates including Procter
& Gamble and Unilever, which own many of the largest personal care brands
on the market. A company called Loop has
designed reusable deodorant bottles for Dove, Degree, and Axe, along with
Pantene shampoo, Crest, and OralB mouthwash. (Loop will also work with food
brands to create reusable containers for things like Hellman’s mayonnaise and
Ranch dressing.)
WHY THE
BATHROOM?
You don’t realize it until you really look for it, but there’s
plastic everywhere in your bathroom–and it’s all disposable. Cyrill Gutsch, a
former designer and the founder of the environmental startup Parley for the
Oceans, points out that plastic was first engineered a century ago to be a
material that would exist forever. This was extremely valuable for making
things that needed to be durable, like furniture or car interiors. But it never
made sense to use it in items that were designed to be disposable, which
includes most of the items in our bathroom, many in our kitchen, and even the
fast-fashion garments we wear, which are so inexpensive that consumers often
only wear them between seven and 10 times before chucking them out.
Companies did have reasons for making disposable items out of
plastic. When plastic became mainstream in the 1950s, it was so cheap to
manufacture that brands saw it as a clever way to bring new convenience to
customers’ lives. In a famous Time cover from 1955, a family
is standing in front of a trash can, disposable plastic plates, forks, and
straws in the air like confetti, along with the headline “Throwaway Living.”
But this convenience had a cost that many of those companies
didn’t envision. Much of our plastic ends up in oceans. Scientists predict that
if we continue polluting the oceans at the current pace, our coral reefs will
be dead by 2030 and all marine life will be dead by 2048. That could mean
not only the extinction of many beautiful ocean creatures, but also the
potential end of ecosystems that many people depend on for survival. This is a
problem that will soon threaten human life.
RECYCLING IS
NOT ENOUGH
Many of us believe that we’re already tackling the plastic problem
by recycling our shampoo and mouthwash bottles. Of course, recycling the
disposable plastic bottles we use is the right thing to do. But it’s not
enough.
Despite a growing worldwide effort to recycle, only a small
proportion of people actually consistently recycle every single plastic item they use. Even then, only about 10% of items placed in a recycling bin actually end up being recycled because
so much of it is too contaminated with food or chemicals to use. Since plastic
does not biodegrade, it sits in landfills forever, and can get swept into water
streams when it rains, or in a gust of wind. In countries where waste
management systems are poor, even more of this plastic gets swept out to sea.
Today, the world produces an estimated 300
million tons of plastic a year, half of which is single-use. Our plastic consumption
keeps going up year after year, adding to the already massive amount of plastic
we have already made. Experts believe about 8 million tons of plastic ends up
in the ocean every year, which marine animals mistake for food, choking and
poisoning them.
PRODUCE
PLASTIC ALTERNATIVES — AND MAKE THEM PRETTY
The real solution is to stanch the overproduction of new plastic
in the first place. And this is what we’re seeing with the new wave of
eco-friendly personal care brands. But the packaging is not without headaches.
It may be more expensive, at least up front. And switching from disposable to
reusable does introduce the minor inconvenience of ordering refills and
inserting them. So to persuade consumers that non-plastic alternatives are
desirable–and worth the extra money and effort–companies have to invest in
innovative design and branding.
Myro’s reusable deodorant cases, for instance, are minimalist,
with a round polygon shape. The brand’s name is subtly engraved on one side and
does not stand out. Myro seems to be targeting consumers who care about how
their everyday products look on their bathroom counter, by offering five trendy
color options,
By Humankind’s products are also designed to be attractive, with a
dearth of wording and several color options. The mouthwash tablets, for
instance, come in a little round container that’s either light green or charcoal.
Focusing on the nuances of shape and color makes sense for these
brands on another level. They are making containers that are designed to live
in customers’ bathroom for years to come. Beauty can’t be an afterthought.
INNOVATIONS
AHEAD
Given the scale of the problem, will any of this really move the
needle? Gutsch is optimistic, in part because the swell of innovation around
eliminating single-use plastic from bathroom products could persuade other
product categories to also reconsider packaging. As I reported
earlier this year, we’re seeing similar buzz in the world of food storage, as
startups work to create reusable food wraps and bags.
Ultimately, the end goal here is for plastic-heavy industries to
come up with new alternatives. Will our homes be remade in biodegradable
materials overnight? Of course not. But for now, we can tackle one room at a
time. And the good news is that we’re well on our way to ridding our bathrooms
of single-use plastic.
BY ELIZABETH
SEGRAN
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