Our Packaging

Plastic packaging is far from perfect when you think about the full life-cycle of products and how long plastic takes to break down. We use use a material called HDPE which is the most recyclable plastic currently available (recycling code 2).

By 2012 we will be using up to 80% of post consumer recycled plastic (from roadside collection) in our bottles. There is currently no system in New Zealand to use post-consumer recycled plastic. Our investment in developing recycled plastic technology is part of our long-term plan to recycle and regrind empty containers for re-use. We are already encouraging customers at our Auckland store to return their empty ecostore bottles to us. We then feed the collected plastic bottles through a dedicated regrind machine and send the plastic chips to our bottle manufacturer to be made into new ecostore bottles. We use clear polypropylene labels on our bottles which are on a clear polyester backing material and are fully recyclable – so there’s no need to remove them from the bottle before recycling. The clear backing and labels reduce the amount of printing inks and dyes required and we use a water based adhesive to apply them as it has a lower impact on the environment than solvent based glues.
The measuring scoops inside our laundry powder boxes are made from 100% post consumer regrind plastic. We manufacture the only plastic trigger spray in NZ that contains no metal parts making it fully recyclable.
Our laundry boxes are made of 95% recycled materials and our auto dish tablet boxes are made from 85% recycled materials. The plastic bag inside our laundry boxes is made of LDPE which is recycling code 4. We are are looking forward to phasing the bag out by July 2012 once we have made some necessary adjustments to our laundry powder formulation.

Adopting best practice in labelling means listing all product ingredients on our labels.

We voluntarily use a best practice standard of disclosure known as INCI which requires us to list the full scientific names of all ingredients. Surprisingly, no disclosure of ingredients is required on cleaning product labels but we believe it’s important so that people can easily identify and research every ingredient. This is particularly important for anyone with allergies.

We’re doing trials using different percentages of plastic HDPE regrind content into our bottles. The greyish black inner wall of this bottle is made from regrind plastic. We hope to complete our trials and start producing our new bottles by 2012

Did You Know?
Our laundry boxes are made of 95% recycled materials and our auto dish tablet box is made from 85% recycled materials. Recycled cardboard is less strong than virgin cardboard so a small amount of virgin material is still required for strength and stability.