Bottled shampoo is mainly water and plastic. While you may choose organic or toxic-free, while it's housed in a container made from oil - even if it is recycled - one of the most persistent polluting materials on our planet, what's the point?
This is why Lush's shampoo bars are genius: solids of follicle goodness, minus the H2O and oil-based packaging. They last forever so save you cash, and for every 500 000 shampoo bars sold 1.5 million bottles are saved - aka sent to landfill or ending up in our oceans - and carbon emissions massively cut.
Find out more from Kate Hind, on the Lush green team, on why bottles are bonkers...
The majority of liquid shampoos available on the market are mostly made up of water, surfactants and other chemicals, fragrance, preservatives a plastic bottle and a lid. The obvious reason why traditional shampoo needs to come bottled in plastic in because it is liquid!
Lush asked itself - 'What if we took the water out and made it solid? Would we then be able to eliminate the plastic bottle?' The answer was a resounding YES.
To make a bar of squeaky green, we use a mixture of coconut-based solid surfactant (the cleansing agent) and a mixture of essential oils. You'll find no water, no preservatives and no bottles.
Because Squeaky Green contains no water, it is very concentrated. You can get between 80 and 100 hair washes out of one bar, making it the equivalent of 2-3 200ml liquid shampoo bottles. So, for every solid shampoo bar Lush sells, we're preventing about 75g of plastic from being introduced into the environment.
We sell around 1,900,000 million solid shampoo bars a year. Because a bar lasts as long as three bottles of shampoo, we prevent approximately 5.7 million bottles from being produced, transported, sold, used and disposed of every year.
If you consider that your average 200ml bottle with a lid weighs 25g, the bottles saved by the sale of solid shampoo add up to 142 tonnes of plastic not used. According to WRAP, a kg of virgin PET has the carbon impact of 3.4kg of CO2. Therefore, we also avoid 484 tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of nearly 1000 return flights to Turkey.
But the positive effects do not stop there, a full bottle of liquid shampoo in weight and volume is around five times heavier and bulkier than our shampoo bar. When transporting liquid shampoo, one is basically moving water and plastic. To get the same number of hair washes you would need fifteen lorries to transport the equivalent in one lorry of shampoo bars.
Is the shampoo bar Mighty? Hell yes!
