Case Study: Building a Better Bottle with Replenish, by Jason Foster
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Five years ago I had an epiphany while I was ironing my shirt. I found myself wondering why it was that my ironing spray had to come in such a big bottle? Why couldn’t it come with a concentrate I could dilute myself in one integrated bottle, not two separate containers? In fact, why didn’t all of my household goods couldn’t come in a more sensible, compact concentrate mixing system. The solution I saw in my mind was an integrated bottle built for mixing concentrates.
One morning in April I opened The New York Times to find the article “As Consumers Cut Spending, ‘Green’ Products Lose Allure” by Stephanie Clifford and Andrew Martin. The crux of the article was that consumers are not willing to pay more for ‘green’ products, especially in hard times.
As a green products entrepreneur, I believe they shouldn’t have to. Consumers can be green and save money, we just have to design better products so they can do both.
Spurred on by my ironing epiphany I went digging in the patent universe to see what ideas were out there; I wanted to know if an integrated bottle system already existed. It didn’t. I saw that Arm and Hammer had come out with an “Essentials” line in 2008 that consisted of an empty bottle with two packages of cleaner concentrate shrink wrapped to the bottle. Although its intentions were admirable, it did not offer the consumer the integrated approach to mixing concentrates and reducing packaging waste that I was thinking of. I knew then that I had to fundamentally rethink what a bottle should look like and what purpose it should serve.
What we thought was missing was a bottle platform that was built specifically for concentrates and was reusable. If we had that, then we wouldn’t have to ship water all around the country in disposable bottles. I wanted to develop a reusable bottle based on a system of dispensing concentrates to cut down on plastic waste, promote reusability, and reduce the associated environmental toll of shipping excess water all around the country. I wanted to create a smarter bottle.
What drove my design for Replenish was the desire to re-imagine what the design for a bottle and container should be. To ever move forward, we needed a new design and a fresh approach that could cut out the wastefulness I saw throughout the system, provide an environmentally sound alternative to conventional, pre-mixed cleaners and save consumers money. My goal was to completely reinvent the system to be designed for lesser impact and lower waste.
William McDonough’s and Michael Braungart’s Cradle to Cradle philosophy came to be my guiding light, so it was only natural that I approached McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (MBDC), their green chemistry firm, to put Cradle to Cradle principles to use in building Replenish. I wanted to design a product made with materials with life cycles that are safe for human health and the environment.
The Replenish bottle is built to last for years, not months, the cleaning solution itself can return safely to the environment, and the concentrate pods are easily recyclable, making it easy to collect and recover the value of these materials following their use.
