My first lesson in savvy consumerism came in elementary school from my best friend’s mother, who sat us down and handed us a bottle of fancy grown-up shampoo. “Let’s read the ingredients,” she said.

We started: “Aqua …”

She cut us off there. “What do you think aqua is?”

“Water?”

“Yes! It’s just a fancy name for water!”

I now know that brands who call water “aqua” are simply abiding by the International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients (and by “now know,” I mean I just looked it up), but at the time, the fancy vocabulary struck me as a mild consumer scam designed to hide how much of our fanciest consumer products are simply water. It also spawned in me a lifelong interest in reading ingredient labels.

So 25 years later, when brands started shipping normally waterlogged products to consumers with all or most of the water removed, I was intrigued.

More than 90 percent of a typical bottle of cleaning product is simply water

According to the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, more than 90 percent of a typical bottle of cleaning product is simply water. Drying out these cleaning and personal care products does several environmentally friendly things: It reduces their volume, thus reducing the number of boats and trucks needed to transport them. It reduces their weight, thus further reducing fuel and carbon emissions associated with shipping them. And it reduces the plastic packaging by requiring a smaller container to hold the refillable concentrate, or by precluding the need for any disposable plastic at all. An estimated 20 percent or more of global disposable plastic packaging by weight could be replaced by reusable packaging if we only shipped active ingredients.

The time is ripe for a low-plastic, just-add-water revolution. Only 5 percent of plastic produced globally is ever recycled, a number that has likely dropped since China stopped accepting our recyclables in 2017. You’ve probably heard this, but there’s a lot of plastic swirling around in our oceans, and in developing countries, single-serve product sachets are a scourge on the rivers and beaches.

Almost all at once, waterless products have arrived to save the day. By Humankind (emphasis theirs) launched in February. The startup makes a “forever” refillable container for its mouthwash tablets, packages its shampoo bars in paper boxes, and provides refills for its deodorant. It’s all in the design scheme du jour: gender-neutral, with minimalist font swimming in pastel color schemes.

Truman’s, which also launched in February, says shopping for cleaning products is too confusing and onerous, offering as an alternative four concentrated cleaning products for glass, floors, bathrooms, and all-purpose, shipped in small recyclable plastic refill cartridges that fit in the neck of its reusable plastic spray bottles.

In 2018, Seventh Generation introduced an “ultra-concentrated” laundry detergent, which the company says uses 50 percent less water and 60 percent less plastic and is 75 percent lighter than the standard detergent bottle. The bottle automatically doses the right amount of detergent with one squeeze. It’s only sold online, or else I would absolutely get that to carry home instead of the standard 100-ounce detergent bottle.

In March, Amazon launched an in-house product line called Clean Revolution. You screw a bottle of concentrate with the equivalent of six refills to the bottom of the spray bottle or soap dispenser, and pour water into the top. The product has 3.9 stars online; the complaints that the refill pod can sometimes leak are far outweighed by praise for how eco-friendly it is.

The system is by a packaging company called Replenish, which has its own line, CleanPath. It’s a subscription refill service for five cleaning products that lets you choose your scent, your bottle and baseplate color, and — for an additional $7.95 fee that strikes me as patently ridiculous — a customizable label. Buying a six-time-use refill is certainly less wasteful than the alternative, but the drawback is that, like a fancy Gillette razor, you’re now wedded to that particular refill and at the mercy of CleanPath’s redesign process. “We regret that previous versions of CleanPath reusable bottles and refill pods have been discontinued and are not compatible with the all new CleanPath,” it says in tiny font on the website.

All of the above products promise to be nontoxic, of course. We’re talking about a target market of eco-minded consumers here. The European brand Cif doesn’t make that promise. (It might not have to, as Europe has banned a much longer list of potentially toxic ingredients, so Europeans tend to be a little more relaxed than we are.) That hasn’t stopped Unilever from launching the Cif ecorefill in July, a 10-times-concentrated liquid refill for the normal Cif spray bottle, which Unilever now markets as a lifetime piece. If the spray trigger breaks, it will even deliver a new one for free. And once you remove the plastic sleeves, the ecorefill tube can be thrown the recycling bin. According to Unilever, asking consumers to dilute the product at home means 97 percent less water being transported, 87 percent fewer trucks on the road, and less greenhouse gas emissions.

Asking consumers to dilute the product at home means 97 percent less water being transported

That all sounds great, but in actuality, distribution of Unilever’s products, which range from Dove to Axe, Hellmann’s to Bertolli, Suave to Tresemmé, only accounts for 3 percent of Unilever’s greenhouse gas emissions. (The company says 25 percent is in raw materials and blames 65 percent on how consumers use the products. Our bad?)

But this isn’t about carbon emissions. Unilever, cognizant of the growing resentment against single-use plastic, has vowed to reduce the weight of its packaging by one-third, halve the waste associated with the disposal of its products by 2020, and use only reusable, recyclable, or compostable packing by 2025.

Its efforts in this direction have been tentative. In 2018, it launched a 3-liter bottle of a Brazilian laundry detergent brand with a formula six times the concentration of the original. Unilever says it’s reduced the volume of plastic used for the detergent by 75 percent.

Unilever is one of the consumer product behemoths in Loop, an ambitious cross-brand pilot project that ships reusable containers of everything from Degree deodorant to Häagen-Dazs ice cream to your door and then picks up the empties when you’re done. For that, Unilever redesigned Signal toothpaste to come in tablet form in a recyclable and refillable jar. You just chew one, brush your teeth, then rinse.

I can’t tell you how Signal tabs work — I signed up for Loop’s pilot in New York City the day it was announced in January and haven’t yet gotten off the waitlist. But I have tried out ChewTab by Weldental, which was relaunched this year in a glass bottle with a metal lid to appeal to the zero-waste market. The sickly sweet minty xylitol is an acquired taste ... but the bottle sure looks good on my medicine cabinet shelf.

If I’m honest, aesthetics are also why I selected Blueland, launched on Earth Day in April 2019, to test out this whole just-add-water fad for myself. That, and out of all the cleaners described above, it had no one-use plastic in its refill system and the most certifications, including the reputable Cradle to Cradle certification, which covers not only how the product is made and disposed of but also its toxicity — or lack thereof.

I asked Blueland to send me a kit, and a few days later, a simple cardboard box arrived at my apartment. Inside, I found three shatterproof acrylic spray bottles accented in pink, yellow, and Caribbean blue and labeled in tiny font: Bathroom, Multi-Surface, Glass + Mirror. I filled the bottles with aqua de tap, unwrapped three tablets in corresponding colors, put the postmodernist wrappers in the compost bin, and dropped the tablets in the bottles, where they fizzed just like antacids. An hour later, I used the resulting lightly scented cleaners to wipe down my countertop and mirror and, with the help of a scrubby brush, break apart the soap scum in my bathtub.

Before I put them away, I Instagrammed my zero-waste, nontoxic cleaning supplies and received a barrage of questions from my friends eager to try for themselves what might be the most attractive cleaning system ever made.

If I sound like I’m in the Blueland cult, I apologize. I really did try to find something wrong with the products, and I couldn’t. While a lot of these supposedly more sustainable consumer products are rightly criticized for feeding our ever-expanding appetite for more stuff, you can’t quibble with making cleaning products — a necessary component of doing life — more sustainable. Blueland could only steal market share, not create a whole new purchasing category. I’ve DIYed my cleaners before, and found myself with shards of glass in my foot after my cat shoved the pretty brown glass spray bottle off the counter. And you can call it the placebo effect or clever marketing, but I honestly don’t believe plain white vinegar works as well as formulated cleaning products. Also, jugs of vinegar are mostly water.

I guess my only quibble with this wave of just-add-water products is this: Shipping dry ingredients in compostable packaging and adding water to them ourselves is not a new concept. In fact, we’ve been doing it for thousands of years. Hello, tea, coffee, and soap. It’s only in the past few decades that we’ve taken these formerly eco-friendly items, added in water pumped out of water-scarce areas; thrown in aspartame, flavoring, parfum, and various other synthetic ingredients; put them in plastic bottles with cool logos and ridiculous health promises; and shipped them around the world.

The fact is, even if every glass and multi-surface cleaner on the market came in tabs and refill cartridges, it would be BB shot compared to the warships of “functional” beverages that exist for no other reason than getting us to buy more stuff. According to Blueland’s research, the average American home will go through 30 single-use plastic bottles of cleaner in a year. Reducing this to zero is a good thing, sure. But in 2017, America’s per capita consumption of bottled water rose yet again to 42 gallons. That’s equivalent to more than 300 bottles of water. In Europe, plastic drink bottles are the most prevalent form of plastic found in waterways, now that plastic bags have been tackled.

Yes, I’m definitely signing up for a Blueland subscription because I’m a sucker for pretty stuff that makes me feel less personally guilty about being an American consumption monster. But I’m under no illusion that this will save the world. It will merely save me a few trips downstairs to the recycling bin.

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