There are days when I feel like I have a business with a broken mission. When I started The Refoundry, I intentionally started it with the goal of reducing plastic waste. When I did this, I was originally thinking about new products made from recycled plastic. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the market fit with the first few ideas despite investing heavily in R&D.
Then I started Harvestcare with the plan to reduce plastic waste in hotels by offering an alternative to single-use plastic amenities. Of course, Covid has put a damper to these plans and other challenges have popped up since then i.e. my soapmaker having to tackle a very serious medical issue.
The consumer side of the Harvestcare brand is doing okay in the meantime despite the lack of marketing. In fact last week, I had one of my biggest reorder weeks in a while from stockists. The problem? Sometimes I feel like I generate more waste than I save, and therefore have a broken mission.
The reality of waste in manufacturing
As an example, all of my product labels are plastic and come on vinyl sheets that cannot be recycled. I started with paper labels, but soon had complaints from customers that the ink was coming off of the bottles. I quickly had to invest in waterproof plastic labels to fix this.
Speaking of labels, I also have thousands of dollars of labels I cannot use because the ingredients changed, the package size was slightly different or the product proved to be a market failure. I have no choice but to throw these away. Even Officeworks has struggled with this issue with vinyl labels despite all their good efforts. Check out my podcast where we chat about this.
Then, there’s the plastic packing waste that comes with almost all my ingredients for products. At least a lot of it is in hard plastic that can be recycled.
There’s also waste from mistakes and perishable products. I have about 100 bottles of conditioner I need to throw away because it’s past the shelf-life. I’ll recycle the bottles, but I still have to throw away the plastic pumps and ingredients.
And even last night, one batch of my lip gloss didn’t smell right and so I had to throw it all away. Ugh! This waste drives me crazy!
Plastic in packaging
I also have the challenge of some plastic in my packaging even though I mostly use, very expensive aluminium. The plastic can be found in the bottle pumps as I have found no other option for these types of liquids. At the beginning, I was encouraging people to swap the bottles and reuse the pumps, but found few stockists that wanted to sell this option. I even had to reduce the bottle size from 500ml to 150ml because that’s what the customers wanted.
There’s also a small plastic insert in the lid of each aluminium tin. If I ordered a large enough quantity, I could ask the manufacturer to leave it out for our solid products like hand balm and lip gloss. Unfortunately, we are no where near this quantity yet.
However, for the liquid products we originally designed for the hotel industry, the insert is still needed to prevent leaks.
I’ve looked at all other types of possible packaging available in the marketplace right now, and unfortunately there are no better options yet.
The quick fix to my broken mission?
Last night I spoke to the Plastic Collective about plastic neutral credits. They’ve offered this before, but now it’s backed by an international certified scheme, much like carbon credits. Through their program, you can pay for a certain amount of plastic to be picked up in developing countries to offset the plastic we’re generating here.
Unfortunately the mandatory audit requirements are too expensive for a small business like mine. However, I’ll probably invest in it anyway at the individual level without obtaining the official “plastic neutral” certification. At least, I’ll feel a little better about our waste issue.
Nonetheless, this is not the kind of fix I dreamed of when starting this company. So, a big question on my mind is, do I continue with this broken mission (and gamble the hotel industry to be interested and my soapmaker to be healthy again), or do I try something else?
Truthfully, I’m really not sure yet.
