By Charles Carter, 14/9/22
Dutch innovators SOAPBOTTLE have developed a shampoo and shower gel bottle made from soap to help reduce plastic waste.
The idea is that when you’ve finished with the liquid inside, you use up the soap packaging, until there’s none of it left.
The startup team, consisting of three women and one man, ran a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter in 2021, raising over €125k from 2,800 plus backers.
The company is currently in the product development phase and aim to ship orders in 2022.
Co-founder Jonna Breitenhuber created and developed the concept of SOAPBOTTLE during her master’s degree in product design at the University of Arts in Berlin.
How does it work?
The bottle comes as a sealed unit, so you first have to cut a corner off to create an opening. You then attach a reusable stainless steel metal clip that covers the hole for opening and closing.
You can also attach a sustainable ribbon to the bottle for hanging in the shower, if that’s your vibe.
For the SOAPBOTTLE container, the team are developing a formula made out of organic raw ingredients such as water, plant-based oils, fats as well as caustic soda.
Tangent box (bottle -> entrepreneurs): Entrepreneurs need to take risks and have bottle when launching a new product. To have bottle is an English idiom which means to be bold. (Hmm…OK, but why is this in the middle of the article? Tangential thinking is essential for creativity and innovation, and Superinnovators promote it!)
What are the potential benefits?
On average a person throws away ten plastic shampoo bottles and eleven plastic shower gel bottles each year. This amounts to 75 kilotons of waste, some of which pollutes our rivers and oceans, or takes 400 million years to decompose in landfill.
Shampoo and shower gel bottles can be recycled in developed countries with advanced recycling initiatives, but many are not.
SOAPBOTTLE could start to make a dent in the mountain of plastic if they begin shipping this year and all through the principles of the circular economy and zero waste.
How much does it cost?
A pair of SOAPBOTTLES cost crowdfunders €30, with the price reducing for bigger orders. But the company are not currently taking new orders.
The price per bottle is likely to fall when production scales.
Questions for you. Comment below
- First thought that comes into your head?
- Pros and cons according to you?
- Other applications of this approach?
- What could this be combined with?
Itís hard to come by knowledgeable people for this subject, but you sound like you know what youíre talking about! Thanks