Replenish Brings the Refill to Personal Care

Sustainability becomes embedded when it becomes invisible, and that happens as a consequence of good design. People don’t buy Tesla Roadsters because they’re efficient. They buy them because they are beautiful and powerful and fast. People use refillable water bottles because they make sense, especially if you think about the amount of waste associated with disposable bottles.

The new personal care product bottles announced by Replenish yesterday at the 2014 BSR conference, fall somewhere between the two and will do well because of it. It’s a terrific combination of great design and good sense. These new reusable bottles are designed to internally accept replacement pods of concentrate that are mixed inside with no mess.

You might think: This is not a big deal. Refills of things like liquid hand soap have been around for a while. And all kinds of products are sold as concentrates. There has also been a recent move towards compaction in areas like laundry detergents. As there should be. Considering the fact that most home care products contain 90 percent water, why spend the fuel and the carbon and the money to ship water to millions of homes when we already have perfectly good water supply systems that do that very well for far less money?

We’ve been doing that with coffee and tea for as long as we’ve been drinking them. Now Coca-Cola is allying with Green Mountain Keurig so that we’ll soon be able to do it with soft drinks, too.

The idea might seem obvious, but as I learned when I spoke with Replenish founder Jason Foster, that doesn’t mean it was easy to make it happen. In fact, when Foster came up with the idea seven years ago (while ironing a shirt) he wondered, “Why isn’t there a bottle like this already?”

Even if the idea was obvious, the implementation was not. The Replenish bottle design is elegant. Here’s how it works: The squirt bottle has a threaded hole in the bottom to which the concentrate pod attaches. There is also a valve inside that keeps the concentrate from leaking in or the mixture from leaking out. Then, inside the main bottle is an upside-down measuring cup which is some distance away from the bottom.

When you want to refill the bottle, you turn the bottle, with the pod attached, upside down. Then you squeeze the pod which forces the concentrate past the valve and into the measuring cup. You need the measuring cup because the pod contains more than one bottle’s worth of product.

Turning the bottom right-side-up dumps the concentrate onto the floor of the bottle. Then you unscrew the top of the bottle and pour the water in up to the fill line. Screw the top back on and you’re ready to go. It doesn’t matter if you’re filling up hand soap, hand sanitizer, bathroom cleaner, bath cleaner or multi-surface cleaner, all of which were announcd under the CleanPath brand sold exclusively at WalMart. All of them work exactly the same way.

Another thing that had to be overcome: virtually all the plastic bottles being made today are made using blow molding, which has been refined to the point where it is very inexpensive and well suited to very high volume production. But the Replenish bottle concept, because of the valve and precision required to keep the value from leaking, needed to be injection molded. This created another barrier. Injection molding would be more expensive unless it could be done on a large scale.

That’s where Wal-Mart came in to play a major role. The retail giant had already been pursuing a strategy of compaction, to reduce shipping costs and to increase the revenue per unit of shelf space. They recognized the value of the Replenish concept right away. They lent their muscle, their distribution chain, their private label home care product manufacturer Vi-Jon Laboratories, and their plastic bottle manufacturer Berry Plastics, to attack the problem . The result of that collaboration has now officially hit the shelves.

The idea, would have likely taken off on its own merits anyway, but due to the scale of production that WalMart has brought in, we now have what Foster calls, “disruptive economics.” That’s because the reusably packaged product now costs less than the disposable one. Not someday, down the road, but right away. That pricing will overcome much of the resistance to the fact that this is something new and that the consumer has to do something they did do before, which is to switch over to a new pod when the old one is empty.

The only other question is about the effectiveness of the products themselves, which I assume will be comparable to what WalMart sells today as their in-house brand. But they have not restricted Replenish from approaching other manufacturers, so it might just be a matter of time before you see your favorite product in bottles like these.

Image Courtesy of Replenish

RP Siegel, PE, is an author, inventor and consultant. He has written for numerous publications ranging from Huffington Post to Mechanical Engineering. He and Roger Saillant co-wrote the successful eco-thriller Vapor Trails. RP, who is a regular contributor to Triple Pundit and Justmeans, sees it as his mission to help articulate and clarify the problems and challenges confronting our planet at this time, as well as the steadily emerging list of proposed solutions. His uniquely combined engineering and humanities background help to bring both global perspective and analytical detail to bear on the questions at hand.

Follow RP Siegel on Twitter.