Simply Clean Cleaning Powder Packaging changes

Simply Clean are an Australian company who make natural cleaning products for every room in your home. They have you covered in the bathroom with toilet cleaners, natural mould sprays, disinfectant, glass cleaner and general bathroom cleaning sprays. In the kitchen there's dish liquid, floor cleaners, surface sprays and dishwasher powders. In the laundry, laundry powders and stain removers which are popular.

Today we wanted to talk about the conscious decision Simply Clean have made to change the way they package their bulk powders, including their Lemon Myrtle Laundry Powder and the Lemon Myrtle Dishwasher Powder.

This may not seem like a significant change in packaging on face value, but there's one very important difference in the tall plastic bottle on the left with the narrow screw lid vs the shorter plastic jar on the right hand side.

What is that difference? How easy or difficult it is to refill. Why is that important? The change to the bulk packaging is significant. Your ability to easy refill the first container will make a difference when you decide if buying bulk and refilling is right for you.

The original bottle on the left was made with easy pouring in to the powder dispenser in your dishwasher. Using natural dishwasher tablets is the easiest way to get the right dose of product in to your dishwasher, but it's not always cost effective. The next best option is a powder that is easily dispensed from a narrow pouring spout. However, they need refilling with a funnel.

The new wider jar isn't as easy to pour, but it's very easy to fill. Use a spoon or repurpose a scoop you have from another product to measure out your dose, which is approx 15g. The 1kg jars give you 66 washes. At the time of publishing this post, that gives you 20 cents per load (subject to price changes).

Here's where we see our biggest change to their packaging. The original was a 5kg plastic bucket. Not only do we find buckets more difficult to pack because of their size, they are thick and sturdy plastic that needs to be refilled when you're done with your 330 washes. The new product is now a cardboard box with a plastic bag inside. While it's not completely plastic free, it's a soft plastic bag and takes up far less room in the rubbish (if you can find soft plastic recycling, great, but at the time of writing this post, Redcycle wasn't in business).

The bulk size in the cardboard box is still 5kg which lasts you 330 washes. You can fill your tub 5 times. The price of each individual wash is approx the same, but you are saving on plastic.