An article about plastic in the world is easy to write and commits nobody to anything. The harder thing is to write what’s in your own packaging — including the part you don’t like.
Here is the list.
The soaps: paper
A bar of soap doesn’t need a container. It’s wrapped in paper, and that’s it. When it’s used up, there’s nothing left to throw away — only the paper, which gets recycled.
The organic oils: aluminum
The organic body oils come in aluminum bottles.
Here aluminum has two advantages over plastic. The first is technical: it lets no light through, and plant oils oxidize in light. The second is that aluminum can be recycled practically without limit and stays aluminum, while plastic drops a level with every cycle.
The scrubs: aluminum
The body scrubs come in an aluminum tin with an aluminum lid. Under the lid there’s an aluminum foil that seals the tin and peels off the first time you open it.
The gift boxes: cardboard and paper straw
The boxes are cardboard, and the filling that holds the three products in place is paper straw — not plastic pellets, not air cushions.
The soap dishes and sponges: linen and bamboo
The soap dishes and sea sponges are sold in linen drawstring bags with a cardboard tag.
The bag isn’t decoration — once you take the sponge out, it stays a bag. It’s the only kind of packaging that doesn’t need recycling, because it doesn’t get thrown away.
And now the awkward part: the pump
The dispensing pump for the bottles is plastic. There’s no way around it — it says so in the product’s name.
A dispensing mechanism is made of several parts that have to move inside each other, and the alternatives in this price range don’t work well enough for us to offer them.
So we’ve done the only thing that makes sense: the bottles are sold without a pump. The pump is a separate product — you buy it only if you need it, and you move it to the next bottle instead of getting a new one with every order.
One pump used five times is five times less plastic than five pumps. That’s the whole idea.
Why we write it this way
We could have written “plastic-free packaging” and not mentioned the pump. Almost nobody would have noticed.
But the whole point of an open ingredient list is that you don’t choose what to show. The same goes for the packaging. If one day we find a dispenser that works and isn’t plastic, we’ll change the pump and write about it here.
Until then the pump is sold separately, so you buy it once. We aim to use as little plastic as possible, both in production and in packaging.