The Lemon Fool

I hold Unilever shares and so buy its products whenever I can. I use CIF Bathroom and Kitchen sprays and noticed that they offer ecorefills at a slightly reduced price on buying a full size new spray. I was a bit chary of it but they seem to work well. For anyone who does not know about them, once the sprayer (full size container) is empty you remove the spray gun and screw the ecorefill on to the neck and the concentrate then goes into the empty container which you then fill with water, shake and you have a refilled sprayer.

Strikes me as being a good idea because you then use the full size spray container indefinitely and are recycling only the small container of concentrate. I would be interested to know what others think. There may only be a marginal effect for the individual in terms of cost savings and recycling volumes but I guess over their sales volume it will make an appreciable difference.

Dod

There was a discussion on the boards somewhere (DAK, perhaps?) on the recyclability of refill pouches. With one product, the pouches were soft non-recylable plastic, and the new containers were hard more-easily recyclable plastic. But the pouches weigh less, so reduce transport costs. And it's hard to know which is the easier to make, or which already contains recyled material.

From the money perspective, refills are usually cheaper (unless there are deals on the main product), but as we more towards sustainability as well, more factors come into play.

Found it!

https://www.lemonfool.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=24003

Interesting. The Unilever concentrate is actually in hard plastic just like the fullsized container so there is no doubt that it can be recycled. Not so sure about these soft ones that kiloran mentions.

Dod

Dod101 wrote:Interesting. The Unilever concentrate is actually in hard plastic just like the fullsized container so there is no doubt that it can be recycled. Not so sure about these soft ones that kiloran mentions.

Perhaps that thread on DAK was of such global interest that Unilever decided to make their refill concentrate packages out of something easily recycled.

So in terms of sustainability these Unilever ones are smaller as they have the water removed and the consumer adds it at the point of use, so they use less resources to make, less resources to transport, and don't have the sprayer part. I'll look out for them next time I need bathroom cleaner, and pop your share price up a little.

Thanks. Actually that I suppose is the point, that there is no need to transport water since it widely available at the point of use of the cleaner. If you did not have water there would not be a lot of point in using the cleaner anyway.

Dod.

I seriously doubt they recycle plastic chemical bottles. Too likely to contaminate the batch regardless of what material they are made out of. Even where plastic actually get recycled, which is pretty rare, I'd expect bottles which contained chemicals to be rejected by the recyclers. That's why most bleach bottles are coloured.

PS. Why are salt refills (cardboard) more expensive than the original plastic bottles?

Gryff

gryffron wrote:PS. Why are salt refills (cardboard) more expensive than the original plastic bottles?

Isn't it very expensive to make paper / cardboard, and very cheap to make plastic? It terms of money / water / energy, however you look at it, plastic is cheaper. Which is why we are in this mess. (Sorry, I hate plastic.)

Finding the cheapest is not compatible with finding the least plastic. I always buy the 24 pack of loo rolls, because there is less plastic outer per roll than the 9 pack, even when the 9 pack is on a deal that makes the pence per loo roll less. And don't get me started on plastic free versus vegan! I have a hairbrush with bamboo handle and boars hair bristles, and I use silk dental floss. Plastic is higher up my agenda than being plant-based, and it's virtually impossible to be both.

Loup321 wrote:Isn't it very expensive to make paper / cardboard, and very cheap to make plastic? It terms of money / water / energy, however you look at it, plastic is cheaper.

No. Cardboard is cheaper, comes from a renewable source, takes less energy to manufacture, and way more is recycled. So even allowing for the fact the cardboard packaging is likely to be heavier, the cardboard wins in every respect. Oh, and the refill boxes are square, not round, which must surely help shipping.

plastic can have a CO2 footprint... around 12 times higher than cardboard.

Gryff

gryffron wrote:

Loup321 wrote:Isn't it very expensive to make paper / cardboard, and very cheap to make plastic? It terms of money / water / energy, however you look at it, plastic is cheaper.

No. Cardboard is cheaper, comes from a renewable source, takes less energy to manufacture, and way more is recycled. So even allowing for the fact the cardboard packaging is likely to be heavier, the cardboard wins in every respect. Oh, and the refill boxes are square, not round, which must surely help shipping.

plastic can have a CO2 footprint... around 12 times higher than cardboard.

Gryff

Looking at that link (very interesting - thank you!!!), the summary at the bottom says:

1kg of new cardboard requires approximately:

3kg of wood
350 litres of water
Between 7 and 14 kWh of electricity

When using recycled materials, water consumption can be reduced by 50%, and energy use by 25%.

In landfill, cardboard takes between 2 and 12 months to decompose.

1kg of new plastic requires approximately:

2kg of petroleum
180 litres of water.
Between 17 and 32kWh of electricity

When using recycled materials, energy consumption can be reduced by up to 88%.

In landfill, plastic takes between 400 and 1000 years to decompose.

When it comes to transport, plastic has a much lower carbon footprint than paper and cardboard due to its smaller volume and weight. For eCommerce, plastic packaging can be up to 20 times lighter than the equivalent items made from cardboard.

The weight difference is the critical point for me. "...up to 20 times lighter" actually doesn't make sense to me, but I assume that it means "as low as 1/20 the weight". So you would need to divide all the values for plastic by "up to 20". Even if you only divide the values for new plastic by three and compare them with the values for recycled card, they are comparable for the water and electricity, and if the pastic gets lighter it requires less resources to produce. Okay, there is the "cost" of the oil, but the article says that per kg plastic uses up to 12 times the CO2e of cardboard to manufacture, but we still have that up to 20 times weight factor.

Don't get me wrong - I firmly believe we need to eliminate as much plastic use as possible, mainly because it takes 400-1000 years to decompose. We're on the same side on the overall arguement, I think. But the reason for the situation we currently have in the world is that, per item made, plastic is cheaper than cardboard, so manufacturers make plastic. Comparing the per kg values makes a strong argument for cardboard, but the bottom line at the manufacturer is the cost per item - they need 1 kg of plastic or "up to 20" kg of cardboard.

The link was very interesting, and I shall bookmark it to read again. I wrongly believed that recycling paper was more expensive than making new paper, as I knew people in the paper-making industry about 20 years ago. That may have been true at that time, but the article you have linked says that it is not true now.