- Normally, when I buy soap refills,
they come in a big bulky plastic container.
With Blueland, they look like this.
First thing I notice is that it's all cardboard packaging,
no single-use soft plastics right now.
I'm having trouble getting this in.
Oh.
(bottle sprays)
It's been estimated that 90% of the typical
cleaning solution is water,
which means we're using a lot of plastic,
spending a lot of money, and burning a lot of fossil fuels,
shipping around something
(water rushing)
that we can get from the tap in our homes.
That's why I'm excited to connect with
the co-founder of Blueland, a low-waste cleaning solution
that's rethinking cleaning products.
- There were a lot of naysayers who said
that people would not be willing to do
the extra work of putting a tablet in water.
We've been overwhelmed by the response.
- Because, I wanna know, how do we make
home cleaning less wasteful?
I'm Lucy Biggers, and this is "One Small Step".
(upbeat music)
The global pandemic caused
cleaning product sales to skyrocket.
Lysol's parent company reported 13% growth
in the first three months of the year,
reaching $4.4 billion in sales.
Cleaning products like wipes sold out
and stores had a hard time keeping them on their shelves.
But keeping your home clean doesn't have to be wasteful.
That's why I'm excited to connect with Sarah Paiji Yoo,
the CEO of Blueland, a company she co-founded
a little over two years ago.
Blueland is a direct to consumer cleaning company
that sends their refills in tablet form instead of liquid.
This way, customers don't have to buy a new bottle
every time they're buying soap.
Blueland says their tablets are 300 times lighter,
200 times smaller, and 30 times cheaper to ship
than conventional cleaning products.
Since their launch in 2018, they say they've saved
over one billion plastic cleaning bottles
and 60 million square feet of plastic packaging.
Sarah was inspired to start Blueland after
cutting out single-use plastics in her own life.
- As a consumer, I just realized that
many times I had no choice.
It just seemed like everything came packaged
in single-use plastic.
And so that's how the idea for Blueland was born,
in our mission to really eliminate
single-use plastic packaging,
starting with cleaning products.
- I'm on the Blueland website where you can see
all of their cleaning products.
I'm gonna go big and get the Clean Suite, which is $83.
That's so I can try all of their products for this video.
But you can just buy their tablet refills
and use your own bottles.
And then prices start at $6 for three refills,
and get a little cheaper if you buy more at a time.
(door creaking)
All right, Blueland just arrived.
And I'm gonna do a bit of an unboxing
to see what comes with your delivery.
(dynamic music)
First thing I notice is that it's all cardboard packaging,
no single-use soft plastics right now.
At least not yet.
Bathroom, multi-surface, glass and mirror.
Hand soap pump.
- Fill the bottle up with warm to hot water.
You drop a tablet in.
And that's it.
After a few minutes, the tablet works on its own,
it starts bubbling or effervescing.
And after a few minutes you have a full bottle
of cleaning solution, or a full bottle of hand soap.
- Dish soap, whoa.
What's this?
Dish soap powder.
Oh, the dish soap is powder.
Cool!
(jazzy music)
So... (Lucy coughing)
Oh, I inhaled some of that!
Okay.
Pour powder onto wet sponge or dirty dishes,
scrub away grease.
So I put the tablets in here.
I filled these bottles up to the line right here.
And it's taking about, you know, 15, 20 minutes
for them to fully dissolve.
The bottles are made of plastic,
but they're a kind of plastic called Triton,
that Blueland says is sturdy enough to last a lifetime.
- We went with the material that was certified platinum
in material health by Cradle to Cradle.
We did this sort of full materials exploration.
To be honest, you know, in the beginning,
we really agonized over the decision of whether to go glass,
or whether to go ultimately like plastic,
Triton is a plastic.
And we did a lot of consumer research with
thousands of households on that very question.
And it was interesting to find that
over 75% of families came back saying that they weren't
comfortable with the idea of a glass cleaning spray bottle.
And ultimately ended up going with a safe, Triton.
- Are you thinking about with this model of tablets
there's other places that you could go with this?
- We definitely see opportunity to continue to expand
within the cleaning category.
And so that's our near term focus.
But, I'm personally really excited about
expanding into products, personal care, beauty.
Food and beverage is another area
that's really interesting to me, where there is
just so much single-use plastic packaging waste.
- So let's run the numbers.
I usually buy one big soap refill plastic jug
every three months.
So going with Blueland
I could eliminate four plastic jugs per year.
And that's just one cleaning category.
Imagine the impact of surface cleaners and Windex bottles.
That's a lot of plastic.
This here is the bathroom.
(bottle spraying)
Oh, that smells good.
This is the glass and mirror.
Sort of like a Windex.
Just goes on like that.
It doesn't really have a smell,
like the all-purpose cleaner.
Nice.
Multi-surface cleaner.
(Lucy sniffing)
Smells great actually, I really like the smell.
Here is the foaming hand soap.
I'm just gonna give you all.
Oh, let's see, it takes a few pumps.
Oh, oh, it's foaming.
(Lucy laughs)
Nice.
Oh, that's... (water splashing)
That is pretty cool.
This might be my favorite one.
Reusability shows a lot of promise.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation found that reusing bottles
and just shipping active ingredients
could replace an estimated 20% of our global
disposable plastic packaging by weight.
And we need to do something right now because oil companies
are projected to invest $400 billion in petrochemical plants
to produce more plastic in the very near future.
So, here's what you can do.
Reuse.
I know I got the fanciest package from Blueland
showing all their new bottles,
but you don't have to spend a ton of money
to take advantage of Blueland's system.
They actually have small refills on their website
that start at just a few dollars,
and you can put those into existing
cleaning bottles that you already own.
That's all for this episode.
Thank you so much for watching.
And we'll see you next time.
Bye!
Is this the right one?
I'm having trouble getting this in.
Oh.
That one kind of didn't fit, but it's in there now.
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