Join the Ethique Mission to Save Plastic Waste

Join #giveupthebottle 

These little changes we all can make help our Environment and Planet Massively!

To date Ethique and Customers have prevented over 8 million plastic bottles from being made and disposed of.

Join the revolution 

The Mission on Plastic Waste Reduction

Ethique are on a mission to reduce the world of plastic waste while offering our customers 100% sustainable, ethically sourced products, made from natural and effective ingredients. Better for you. Better for the planet.

The Problem

Plastic. Over 40% of plastic comes from product packaging (We're changing that!) 80 Billion plastic bottles disposed of around the world each year are from shampoo & conditioner alone. 8 Million tonnes of plastic end up in the ocean every year. 9/10 fish have ingested microplastics according to studies. By 2050 there will be more plastic in the sea than fish. Only 9% of ALL plastic ever made has been recycled. Every person on earth consumes 40,000 microplastics each year.

The Solution

Ethique is the world's first zero waste and most sustainable lifestyle beauty brand. We use biodegradable ingredients and compostable packaging so all our solid bars leave no trace (except the luscious skin and hair it leaves behind, of course!). Our products are super concentrated so by switching to beauty bars, you're saving plastic bottles going to landfill. Ethique is New Zealand's highest scoring BCorp as well as carbon fiber neutral and living ware employer.

The Journey

To date Customers together with Ethique have saved our planet from over 5 million plastic bottles! Converting thousands of fans to plastic free beauty and are genuinely making a difference to the amount of plastic waste made and disposed of every year. Their goal is to save 50 million by 2025 (and their on track already!). Join the revolution and #giveupthebottle

The Problem with Plastic

The Problem with plastic is multi-faceted. It comes down to how it’s made, how it’s disposed of and what happens to it afterwards.

Plastic production has a huge carbon footprint and is manufactured using massive amounts of oil or natural gas and energy. On average, the initial production process produces about 6kg of CO2 per 1kg of plastic.

The process also places enormous demands on our limited global supply of accessible and usable water. We can use only 0.3% of all water on Earth, yet one HDPE 350 ml bottle^ – the size of a typical bottle from the supermarket - requires 700ml of water to make. Across 6.5M bottles - the amount we’ve saved from entering landfill, so far - that equates to over 16,250,000L of water. That's enough to fill more than 6 Olympic swimming pools.  

That water wasted doesn’t include that contained in the typical list of ingredients. The average bottle of shampoo is diluted with up to 60% water. For conditioner, it’s around 90%. Why waste that precious resource when you’re using these products in a room full of it?!

Once the product has been used, that plastic bottle must go somewhere. Only 9% of plastic is recycled worldwide and we produce about 300 million tonnes of plastic waste annually. Each year, wash off from landfill or improper disposal means 8 million tonnes of plastic ends up in the ocean. That’s a full dump truck, every minute. 

Even in ideal conditions your plastic shampoo bottle will take hundreds and hundreds of years to begin to degrade. The most conservative estimates predict it will break up (not down) after 400 years into something that’s arguably even worse. These are microplastics - teeny, tiny fragments of plastic and they’re everywhere - our oceans and almost all species of fish have been found to contain traces. The synthetic debris has even made its way into our water supply. 

We need to ditch single-use, disposable plastic and one of the easiest changes you can make is to switch to solid bars in plastic-free packaging.

^ Petrochemical derived HDPE (high density polyethylene) is the most common packaging material in the industry.

* Source: unenvironment.org/interactive/beat-plastic-pollution