Plastic Waste Reduction: New kind of CPG products are taking over our home cabinet

3 min readSep 27, 2020

Humans are obsessed with leading cleaner, healthier lives. Underneath your kitchen sink or bathroom sinks, you probably keep stockpiles of cleaning products to make your home spotless and pristine. The result? A multi-billion dollar industry dominated by Windex, Tide, Clorox, Lysol, and many more.

What is the similarity between these products? Plastic and lots of it.

Five billion cleaning bottles are thrown away each year in the US.

Source: American Chemistry Council and National Association for PET Container Resources (NAPCOR).

Plastic was designed to last forever, but companies deliver it in packaging that’s only used once. Plastic packagings account for close to half of all global plastic production.

Today, consumers have good intentions to live more sustainably but lack the necessary choices to meaningfully reduce plastic consumption. Plastic can be found in countless everyday products: shampoo, toothpaste, body shower, lotion, or window glass cleaner. All of these products come in single-use plastic packaging.

Big businesses have an important role to play in providing consumers with more diverse and better choices. How can we switch our mindset as a single-use consumer to reuse and refill mentality?

Consumers interested in changing their purchasing habits can now find new types of consumer packaged goods (CPG). Start-ups, including Blueland, Tru Earth, and Bite, are disrupting the CPG industry by entering the market dominated by big-box retailers and selling similar products in a way that provides more sustainable choices for consumers.

Each of these brands is re-imagining traditional cleaning products to eliminate plastic packaging. By changing the way these products are packaged, consumers can significantly impact plastic pollution reduction as a byproduct of making purchases.

The Water issue.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently published a report that explores micro-plastics’ impact on drinking water quality and human health. Each week, people consume a volume of plastic that is nearly equivalent to a credit card.

Eliminating single-use plastics goes a long way to waste and plastic in global waterways. Key products to eliminate include water bottles, straws, coffee cups, and plastic bags.

Plastic does not break down easily, and micro-plastics are impossible to filter. So, plastics particles appear in the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe.

A trillion plastic bags are used each year in the US alone.

Source: World Watch Institute

Governments are taking action: Canada will ban single-use plastics in 2021. This initiative is modeled on similar legislation passed two years ago by the European Union. In October 2018, the EU voted for a complete ban on a range of single-use plastics across the Union in a bid to curb ocean pollution. The EU hopes this ban will go into effect across the bloc by 2021. The legislation includes a ban on plastic cutlery and plates, cotton buds, straws, drink stirrers, and balloon sticks and reduced single-use plastic for food and drinks containers like plastic cups.

In the United States, similar local initiatives have emerged. San Francisco became the first city in the country to ban plastic bags in 2007. New York State banned single-use plastic carryout containers onMarch 1st, 2020.

Country-wide plastics ban help raise consumer awareness to waste and encourage consumers to consider other waste that can be reduced or eliminated. Plastic pollution is a trending topic on social media, which has helped spread the word, raise awareness, and create mindful consumers.

How can we get better on the packaging front?

Some global CPG corporations are doubling down on waste-reduction efforts. Nestlé has established a packaging research institute to devise more environmentally friendly solutions. PepsiCo has set a goal to reduce its use of virgin plastic by 35% in its beverage containers by 2025. However, it’s one thing to announce more environmentally conscious goals and newly enhanced recycling targets and another to walk the talk in tangible ways to satisfy investors and consumers.

If these two sustainability initiatives prove to be successful, they could move the needle on global waste and push others in the CPG industry to follow suit.

Sources:

Plastic Waste Reduction: New kind of CPG products are taking over our home cabinet

The Water issue.

Written by Cecile Dick Calmes