Customers look at a station for refilling shower gel at a Body Shop store on Bond Street in London, Britain. REUTERS/Siddharth Cavale Acquire Licensing Rights
August 1 - One of the problems with plastics is that they are incredibly durable, yet they are often only being used once, meaning that the plastics mountain just grows and grows. This durability, however, also means plastics, and other materials such as aluminium, hold enormous potential to be reused or refilled. Tube Filling And Sealing Machine
“The benefits of refillable packaging are extensive, ranging from reduced material use, lower carbon emissions, decreased water consumption and enhanced palletisation efficiency,” says Suzy Shelley, sustainability and materials lead at brand design agency Pearlfisher.
Products that are used multiple times per day, or those with high water content that could be removed for shipping and diluted by the user, are ideal for refillables from a sustainability standpoint, says Jo Barnard, creative director at industrial design consultancy Morrama.
Research from consultant and campaign group City to Sea and supply chain specialists Re says that consumers are also keen, with 69% of respondents likely or very likely to try products in returnable packaging if they are available where they shop.
More than half (53%) said they were more likely to buy from a brand that offered products in prefilled returnable packaging, rising to 84% among those that had previously bought products in returnable packaging.
But while a number of companies, including The Body Shop and L’Occitane, have introduced refillable aluminium bottles that can be refilled in store, such circular systems are far from being adopted at scale.
Delivery boxes with the logo of Loop. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes Acquire Licensing Rights
According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, reuse scarcely gets a look-in among the hundreds of companies that have signed the Global Commitment to have 100% “reusable, recyclable or compostable” plastic packaging by 2025. “Reuse ambitions remain limited, as very few brands and retailers have a reuse strategy in place. Despite an increasing number of reuse pilots, many are fragmented and not embedded in a business strategy that could lead to reuse at scale,” it said in its 2022 progress report.
This lack of interest is seen in the slow uptake of TerraCycle’s Loop prefillable service since it was launched in 2019, Loop has partnered with some of the biggest fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) groups, as well as major retailers such as Tesco in the UK, Carrefour in France, Aeon in Japan and Walmart in the U.S., offering a limited range of its products in packaging that was designed to be reused 100 times or more, or be easily recycled. Consumers are incentivised to return the packaging because they pay a deposit. The products in the trial phase ranged from razors to orange juice, electric toothbrushes to tampons.
Focusing on prefills, rather than refills, gets around many of the issues, including hygiene, that have discouraged consumers from returning their empty bottles for refilling to the companies that accept them.
Under Loop, the customer buys a product, either online or in store, pays a small returnable deposit, and then returns the packaging via courier or to their nearest store to get their deposit back. The containers are then cleaned by Loop and refilled by the product manufacturer, ready to be sold again.
While Tesco ended a year-long trial of the platform online and in 10 UK stores last year, Clemence Schmid, general manager for Loop Global at TerraCycle, said Loop remains present in 100 stores in Japan and 50 stores in France. Carrefour in France aims to increase that to 500 stores, while the partnership with Walmart in the U.S. is also being expanded, she said.
TerraCycle has learned that the scheme is more effective if consumers can “buy anywhere and return anywhere”, rather than having to return packaging to the store they bought it from, or only from home, says Schmid.
Plastic bottles of Heinz tomato ketchup sit on a shelf in a Tesco store in London, Britain. Ketchup in refillable bottles was one of the products trialled during Tesco's partnership with Loop. REUTERS/Simon Newman Acquire Licensing Rights
At the same time Tesco was trialling the scheme in the UK, McDonald’s was partnering with Loop to pilot reusable cups in some locations. A Loop spokesman was reported as saying in 2020 that consumers could buy shampoo in reusable packaging at, say, Tesco and return it to McDonald's, and vice versa.
Tesco did not want to comment for this article, but in a report on the results of the Loop trial, Ashwin Prasad, the company’s chief product officer, said “For a prefill packaging proposition to succeed as a genuinely accessible and affordable option in the long term, it will need scale.”
The report said if all customers in its 10 pilot stores had switched their ketchup, cola and washing-up liquid purchase to the reusable Heinz Tomato Ketchup, Coca-Cola and Ecover alternatives, reusable packaging would be used more than two and a half million times a year, with vast implications for reducing plastic waste.
“We want to work out how to build an even better proposition that can better integrate the operational complexities of a reuse proposition into our business and enable us to achieve greater scale, as more customers become ready for it,” the report said.
The key to successful reuse and refill programmes is that they must be convenient for consumers,” says Ignacio Gavilan, director of sustainability at the Consumer Goods Forum.
Morrama’s Barnard said the issue with Loop and other similar platforms is that the delivery, collection, cleaning and the cost of the more durable packaging are ultimately going to be passed on to the user.
A Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) 'Smart Fill' refilling machine inside a supermarket in Mumbai, India. REUTERS/Francis Mascarenhas Acquire Licensing Rights
“There is little incentive to get my washing detergent and shampoo delivered if I could get them cheaper at the supermarket when I’m shopping for my groceries. I believe in-store solutions are more likely to take off,” she says.
“We are now used to taking reusable shopping bags to the supermarket, so it’s not a big step to take refillable packaging. More and more stores are offering bulk refill options for cleaning products and dry food options at a lower cost than the packaged alternatives, so there is a clear incentive to the customer.”
Products that are used multiple times a day, or those with high water content that could be removed for shipping and diluted by the user are ideal for refillables from a sustainability standpoint, she adds. “However, expected brand loyalty is also a key consideration. Toothpaste is a good example of a product that appears ripe for refillable packaging, but purchasing behaviour shows that we are not loyal to toothpaste brands and more often just choose whatever is on offer.”
Nevertheless, there is a multitude of innovative products and services coming to market. Leveraging the fact that many household cleaning products are 90% or more water, companies such as Neat are offering reusable (and often non-plastic) dispensers along with concentrated refills. Users just add water at home, reducing the amount of packaging required, the weight of products to be transported and thus emissions from freight.
Brands such as Mack and Homethings are using materials such as PVA and PVOH, which dissolve in water, for refill sachets. Meanwhile, Modern Milkman, has just launched The Refillables, a range of cereals with a refillable pot that contains sensors, enabling the company to track and trace the packaging.
Packaging analysts Smithers forecasts that the market for refillable and reusable products will grow 5% a year, reaching a value of $53.5 billion by 2027. But without greater buy-in from the big brands, it is difficult to see how.
Mike Scott is a former Financial Times journalist who is now a freelance writer specialising in business and sustainability. He has written for The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, The Times, Forbes, Fortune and Bloomberg.
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