The Return of the Airless

Originally posted 2nd Dec 2020

During the summer we did a couple of surveys and asked our customers what they thought of the glass bottles that we'd introduced for our face creams and cleansers about a year ago. We thought they looked much nicer and most importantly we thought a step towards glass packaging would be better. Seems not everyone agreed with us ! In fact over 95% of customers preferred the airless dispensers.

Although most people agreed that the glass bottles do look better, the emphasis was definitely on recyclability and performance. The survey concluded that the airless dispensers were preferred because they are fully recyclable, unlike the glass dispensers which have a pump mechanism which, although recyclable, is less easy to recycle. In addition, the airless dispensers use pretty much every drop of the product inside, whereas the glass bottles tend to see some cream or cleanser left behind that the pump can't get to. Another problem with the glass bottles appeared to be their weight making them somewhat more difficult and costly to transport, whether taking your moisturiser on holiday, to the gym or simply posting.

If we stand for anything at handmade Naturals it's common sense and practicality (as opposed to gimmicky branding, fancy packaging and nonsense), so back to airless it is ! Airless that contains no metal parts inside so it is fully recyclable.

This change will only apply to our Face Moisturisers and also our two Face Cleansers; both ranges you can see via the links. The products themselves are exactly the same (including award winning) formulations as before and the quantity is the same, so the labels are exactly the same.

Although practicality and functionality is very important, we think everyone should be careful if the plastics recycling mantra that has grown over the past few years.

National Public Radio in the US published a report in September noting that most plastics don't get recycled, in fact the figure is about only 9% ! The problem is the cost of recycling even when the plastic is recyclable - most are not. What we've learned is that everytime a plastic is recycled, it has to be used in a plastic which is the next grade down. So higher quality plastics can be recycled but not into the same type of product, but a product that uses the next quality of plastic down the scale. We believe it's called downcycling. For our products we use HDPE or PET plastic (the dispensers for our moisturisers and cleansers are PET) which are a quality plastic that can be and actually is recycled.

So the key seems to be the avoidance where possible of single use non HDPE or PET plastics (take a look at this from the British Plastics Federation).

The main goal is to reduce consumption of non-environmentally friendly items. Big oil companies are using their resources to develop this as they know that their businesses will change this century, here's something from Exxon Mobile.


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