Zero Co is making single-use sustainable again

45,002,344. That’s the number of water bottles worth of waste that Zero Co has removed from oceans, rivers and beaches around the globe.

Unlike many eco-friendly or green-washed FMCG brands, cleaning up pollution isn’t a side-gig for Zero Co. It’s tackling plastic pollution from both ends of the problem: Reducing household waste while cleaning up the oceans with its 10-for-1 promise; for every product sold, it removes 10 bottles worth of plastic pollution.

Since its founding in 2019, Zero Co has been powering its mission to help families clean up their homes, themselves and the planet with its closed-loop refill system, in which customers purchase pouches of laundry detergent, shampoo and other household cleaning and personal-care products and decant them into dispensers made of recycled ocean plastic. The empty pouches can then be returned in a prepaid envelope to Zero Co to be cleaned, refilled and shipped back.

And more than 120,000 Australian families have bought into Zero Co’s brand mission to remove 1 billion water bottles worth of waste from the ocean.

By any metric, Zero Co is a success. In its first two years, it removed 2 million bottles worth of plastic from the ocean and last year alone it removed 30 million bottles worth of plastic. But for serial entrepreneur and founder of Zero Co Mike Smith, the brand wasn’t moving fast enough to untrash the planet and solve the plastic problem.

The United Nation Plastic Programme states that the equivalent of 2000 garbage trucks full of plastic is dumped into the world’s oceans, rivers and lakes every day, and every year 19-23 million tonnes of plastic waste leaks into aquatic ecosystems.

Smith knew this environmental crisis required a radical solution and he was willing to transform his brand to lead the change.

Opening the closed loop for accessibility 

Zero Co has reimagined household and personal-care products for good – all it took was overhauling its entire product range and business model.

Two years ago, Smith and the team at Zero Co embarked on a research project and eventually a relaunch that would scale the brand to reach its goal at a more urgent rate.

“The old model was a closed-loop model, where we had a refill pouch that we sent to the customer: The customer emptied the product into their bottle, they sent the refill back to us, we cleaned it, refilled it and sent it back out again,” Smith told Inside Retail.

“And it was awesome. It was the first time in the world a company had scaled that kind of model and we cleaned and refilled over 250,000 pouches.”

But instead of patting themselves on the back, Smith and his team at Zero Co dug into their data and concluded that there had to be a better way, a model that could scale the company and, in turn, the cleanup.

“There were a bunch of inconveniences with that model; customers had to go to the post office and send the refills back to us,” Smith explained.

“And even though we were providing free return postage, it was just another job that people had to do. Everyone’s busy and despite their best intentions, we just found that not everyone was sending their pouches back.”

Smith said only 43 per cent of customers were sending the pouches back to be refilled, so while it solved the plastic problem for some of Zero Co’s customers, it fell short by the company’s standards.

“Then, when we looked at the carbon footprint of shipping the pouches back to us, the carbon footprint of cleaning them and the amount of water used to clean them,” Smith said. “It stacked up to be a good solution but not what we believed was the best, ultimate solution.

“Our ultimate goal is to solve the plastic problem and to do that you’ve got to solve it for 100 per cent of the people.”

Zero Co operates under the assumption that the best thing for the planet is the best thing for people and that’s what gave it the confidence to pull the trigger and pivot the entire business.

“The brief was that it’s got to be better for the planet and better for our customers. From that moment, we literally just opened up the floodgates – no idea was shut down,” Smith said.

Designing ForeverFill for a forever planet 

Starting in 2022, Zero Co undertook a research project to examine every possible material that could solve its packaging issue. It looked at every sustainable material from seaweed to algae and sugarcane to molded fibre.

Ultimately, it landed on a paper cartridge refill that pairs with its patented ForeverFill system – a revolutionary packaging solution that is setting a new industry standard.

When asked what was the biggest challenge throughout the development process, Smith replied that it was Zero Co’s insistence on continuing to offer its customers liquid products.

“A lot of other companies in our category are taking the approach of asking the customer to compromise the user experience in order to be sustainable,” Smith shared. “So our challenge was, how do we make packaging that can hold liquids, has the smallest amount of plastic possible, ideally no plastic – and that was a real challenge because paper and liquid are not friends.”

After four years with its previous packaging system, Zero Co announced in August last year that it was making the switch to a world-first, paper-based refill solution, the ForeverFill.

ForeverFill overhauls Zero Co’s entire product range. Customers buy a glass bottle that is designed to last a lifetime and select the paper cartridge of the product they want to pair it with, like hand soap or dishwashing liquid. This system uses 97 per cent less plastic and reduces freight emissions on Zero Co’s top-selling products by up to 75 per cent. 

“It’s so much more convenient for the customer, right? Because you just get the refill, you slide it inside your new bottle and when it’s empty you put it in your recycling bin,” Smith explained.

“The first priority was to make it better for the planet and make it better for people,” he added.

While switching customers over from the original closed-loop refill system to the new one isn’t seamless, Zero Co knows the major reduction in plastic and emissions will offset the one-time impact of switching.

“We knew it was going to be really messy because there’s no clean way to do a hard product transition like this but we just communicated to all of our customers this is what we’re doing,” Smith said. 

“We’re asking existing customers to send back all their empty pouches in the same box [in which] they get the new product, and then we’re going to be recycling that and turning it into new Zero products,” he added.

Building a brand with everyone in mind

Zero Co’s product relaunch came with a complete rebrand, moving away from its signature millennial pink colour palette and towards a vibrant and unpolished aesthetic.

“Our biggest customer group is young families, parents with little kids,” Smith revealed.

“I guess what we’re trying to bring to life with the new creative is the story of the young family and the parent who’s concerned about the planet and wanting to build a better, a better world for their children.”

Like so many household cleaning and personal-care brands, Zero’s latest brand imagery features mums, dads and kids at home, but unlike other brands, it showcases the messy nature of young family life.

“We’re still using the pink, it’s just not probably the thing we’re going to be famous for moving forward. But we will have more Forever bottles in different colourways coming and we will probably bring the pink back just because it’s a crowd favorite,” Smith reassured.

But as compelling as Zero Co’s new creatives are to families trying to balance it all, it’s the convenience of the ForeverFill system that is ultimately attractive to consumers.

Throughout the course of the two-year research project, which resulted in a product overhaul and rebrand, there was one powerful lesson Smith came away with: Convenience is king. 

“The solution that will have the most impact in the world is the one that the most people will adopt, and convenience rules adoption,” Smith professed. “So it doesn’t matter if one system is perfect, if it’s inconvenient, it won’t be the ultimate solution, because we live in an imperfect world, right?” 

Convenience is what drove the single-use plastic problem and Zero Co is looking to beat the unsustainable FMCG industry at its own game.

ForeverFill opens up new convenient avenues for Zero Co, in particular, retail. Currently, 99 per cent of its revenue is direct-to-consumer, through its website, but the new packaging was 100 per cent built for retail and direct-to-consumer sales.

“We are hoping that next year we can expand some of our key product lines out into the supermarket, pharmacy and specialty retail, and a whole bunch of other channels, so it’s accessible,” Smith shared.

Zero Co needs to scale its business so it can scale its ocean cleanup and it wholeheartedly believes the ForeverFill system is the key to untrashing the planet.

“There were lots of dark moments, to be completely honest with you, because we’re literally going to go and reinvent our entire business from the ground up,” Smith confessed.

For him, facts are more important than feelings, especially when it comes to the environmental crisis – a credence he sees many sustainable brands ignoring. Previously, Zero Co was guilty of this, too. 

By being open to reimagining its refill system, however, Zero Co can expedite its mission to 1 billion bottles worth of waste from the oceans, rivers and beaches.

“Every time we sell a product, we collect 10 water bottles, and the only way we get to a billion water bottles is if we sell a lot more products and inspire lots more people to join us in reducing plastic in their home,” Smith concluded.

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