There’s a dirty secret behind many everyday cleaning solutions: About 90 percent of a typical bottle of cleaning product is water, according to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. All that water adds weight and volume, which means boats and trucks need more space to transport the products—and they use more fuel and generate more carbon emissions. And when those single-use plastic bottles and tubes are empty, they usually end up in the trash.
To cut down on environmental waste and reduce recycling needs, a flurry of project teams are delivering a new generation of cleaning and personal hygiene products. The big shift: asking consumers to activate the cleaners by adding that water at home.
The Next Wave
The project team behind Pärla—dehydrated toothpaste tablets about the size of a piece of cereal—was motivated by the fact that 1.5 billion tubes of toothpaste go into landfills or the ocean each year. So the U.K. team made it a requirement that their product wouldn’t use any plastic at all. Instead, tablets are sold in a refillable glass jar. Over the past two years, consumer packaged goods startups like Blueland have rolled out robust portfolios of tablet-based cleaning agents (think: hand soap, laundry detergent, cleaning spray) in refillable containers. And in September, global brand Seventh Generation unveiled its new Zero Plastic line of powder-and tablet-based cleaning products packaged in recycled steel containers.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF PÄRLA TOOTHPASTE TABLETS (LEFT) AND SEVENTH GENERATION INC. (RIGHT)
To eschew plastic completely, Seventh Generation brought together a new project team—dubbed the growth incubator team—that spans packaging, product formulation, sustainability, brand management, consumer insights, supply chain and finance. Then, project sponsors encouraged the team to be ultra-agile in their approach. Rather than a multi-year development cycle that started with market research and focus groups, the project team was instead given a project schedule of just one year to make it to market.
A small and agile team “lets us bring a new idea to market quickly so that we can get real-world learnings on the idea and then iterate and optimize,” Kelly Murosky, senior packaging engineer at Seventh Generation, told Packaging World. The project kicked off in July 2019, production began in July 2020, and the product arrived in September. The team is already brainstorming future possibilities, including infrastructure to make consumer refills possible.
Testing the Waters
At Blueland, product-development cycles also hover around 12 months of R&D, though co-founder and CEO Sarah Paiji Yoo says each finished project informs project planning for future initiatives.
“Every step of the first project was more difficult than we expected—from formulation to setting up a unique manufacturing process to figuring out how to package tablets in paper,” says Paiji Yoo, New York, New York, USA.
Take something as seemingly straightforward as fragrances. Most scent ingredients (both essential oils and synthetic varieties) only come in liquid form, so the lab team had to devise a new way to encapsulate the fragrance in silica. When water is added, the silica dissolves and releases the fragrance. Finding a manufacturer capable of producing the new tablets required site visits to 50 potential manufacturers, ranging from the standard (laundry and medication manufacturing) to the creative (a candy factory).
Yet Paiji Yoo also says that some of the team’s internal requirements were perhaps too high. Initially, for instance, the team had the goal of creating cleaning tablets that would dissolve in water almost instantly. During development sprints, when early formulations took 10 minutes or more to dissolve, the team feared failure. But focus groups showed that consumers didn’t mind waiting for the tablets to dissolve.
That’s served as a strong reminder, she says, that even when working in a novel space where consumer education and awareness can be a barrier, getting a new product into the hands of the end user as early as possible is a worthwhile goal.