Refilling At Home Looks A Promising Option For Some Categories

One of the simpler ways of getting to reuse is for people to do their own refills at home.

The basic idea is simple. People keep ‘bottles for life’ at home and refill them as needed. Because bottles are used over and over people are happy to invest in something better than disposable plastic, such as glass, or stainless steel or crockery.

People can take their reusable bottles to a local store for refills, but an emerging variation is people doing their own refills from bulk containers or concentrates at home.

There are lots of variations on this idea. smol has had success with concentrates for products like laundry powder, dishwashing tablets and sprays. Instead of using liquid, the idea is to use a powder or concentrate and refill at home. It sells product in dry and concentrate form along with reusable bottles. Its bottles are plastic, but in principle they could be in another material and at least they get reused, which helps to prevent plastic waste.

Some companies, like Refill with LESS, sell glass and stainless-steel bottles along with the liquid so people can refill at home. Sometimes the larger bulk container can be sent back for reuse, but even when it isn't, this approach still saves plastic waste since packaging product in small user bottles is much less efficient use of plastic.

It's already possible to get all main personal care and household care products available in refillable form from companies such as Faith in Nature, miniml and Bio-D.

But the big brands have yet to join the party, which means that if you want Dove, TRESemmé, L'Oréal or [name your favourite mass brand], you have no choice but to buy product in single use plastic.

Large companies already recognise the potential of this refilling at home. L’Oreal said: “refill at home is the most powerful system in term of environmental impact”. And Unilever said ‘To date, our most successful refill formats have been refill-at-home innovations, enabled by concentrated formulas and on its website claims its Omo concentrate packaging solution uses 70% less plastic.

But they are being slow to make their top brands available in bulk or concentrate. If they made more product available, more people would refill at home.

Sign our petition to encourage these large organisations to make more of their products available in bulk format so people can do their own refills at home, saving money and preventing plastic waste. It takes just a couple of minutes.