Sachet away: Smart50 innovator Zero Co moves from reusable plastics in major rethink

Australian eco startup Zero Co rocked the cleaning goods market when it launched ‘Forever Bottles’ and refillable plastic sachets, designed for reuse in a closed loop system.

Now, Zero Co is moving away from the format that made it famous.

“I had to learn the hard way that what feels right and what is actually right in the world of sustainability are often very different things,” founder Mike Smith tells SmartCompany.

The 2022 Smart50 Rising Star winner is overhauling its entire product range, after what Smith calls two years of introspection and serious data analysis.

Until now, the core Zero Co system allows customers to buy refillable bottles made from recycled plastic, and sachets filled with dozens of products like laundry detergent, dishwashing liquid, and shampoo.

Customers use those sachets and then send them back to Zero Co for reuse, in a system designed to reduce the amount of single-use plastic that makes its way to landfill.

Some 220,000 pouches have been cleaned and reused in the system to date, Smith says.

“But we are constantly striving to do better and find the best possible solution to the waste problem,” he adds.

After appointing a carbon accounting consultancy and delving into how consumers actually use Zero Co products, the startup found the closed loop system is not perfectly circular.

Around 42% of its reusable sachets are actually returned to Zero Co by consumers, with the remaining contributing to landfill.

“People are busy, right? ” Smith says.

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“And despite everyone’s best intentions, people have got better things to do than collect the 15 empty hand wash pouches and take them to the post office.”

Cleaning, collecting, and re-shipping the sachets also comes with a high carbon cost, mitigating the startup’s goal of reducing the climate effects of everyday life.

“After four years of being in the trenches and building this business model and looking at the data, it became pretty clear to us, probably two years ago, that it’s a good model, but it’s not the best model,” Smith says.

“We just had to look in the mirror — personally, it was a really hard thing to do, to say, ‘I built this thing with the best of intentions, based on the best information at the time’”.

But the resulting emissions were “just too high, was the brutal reality”.

Zero Co’s solution is a new line of mostly-recycled plastic bottles, designed to dispense fluids from paper-based containers.

Unlike the sachets, the paper containers are designed for disposal in the traditional household recycling bin.

The company says it will reduce the amount of plastic used in its products by 97%.

This new ‘ForeverFill’ system will operate differently from ZeroCo’s first take at a closed-loop system, but Smith says it remains a truly circular process.

“In the broader sense of closed loop, it encompasses a national recycling system, where you buy stuff, you put it in your recycling bin, it goes to the recycling center, and then it gets turned into something else,” he says.

“That’s still a closed loop model… because we’re building packaging that’s based on recycled paper to begin with, which is renewable, and can then be recycled and turned back into new products.”

Zero Co says its new product formulations will also be cheaper per use for customers; some laundry detergent will come in around 20% cheaper for the end consumer, Smith says.

To further its sustainability pledge, Zero Co is also planning to collect 10 plastic bottles’ worth of ocean waste for each new product purchased, with 15 people now employed to contribute to the task.

In the next few weeks, Zero Co will share launch dates and information for customers transitioning to the new-look product range.

This isn’t a permanent end for all in-house closed loop systems, Smith says; the electrification of road vehicles and increasing green energy production could lower the carbon cost in the future.

For now, though, Smith says sustainability-focused businesses should think long and hard about what actually works best.

“My advice is: don’t listen to your gut, listen to the data, and do what is actually the right thing, not what feels like the right thing.”

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