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This year Earth Day is focused on plastics, with the theme Planet vs. Plastics.

EARTHDAY.ORG is pushing its message of being “unwavering in our commitment to end plastics for the sake of human and planetary health, demanding a 60% reduction in the production of ALL plastics by 2040”.

If you fancy an intro to the issue, it provides a great Plastic Pollution Primer and Action Toolkit

For our part, we’re offering our best ever discount bundle as an Earth Day Pack to get you everything you need to be able to do your refills from home.

Here at Refill with LESS, we're all about making it easy to do your refills at home. We think it it’s the most efficient and effective way to prevent plastic waste but also save you money.

It turns out, a bunch of big brand companies think much the same. In their 2023 Global Commitments reports, various companies underlined that refilling at home is the best way.

L’Oreal said:  “refill at home is the most powerful system in term of environmental impact”.

It’s clear too that large consumer goods companies are investing in making larger packs available so that people can refill from home. Here's a selection of what some of them said…

• Colgate: During the next year, it is our goal to focus more on reuse/refill… We plan to continue to offer new products that will allow consumers to refill their packaging at home and partner with organizations working with reuse/refill.
• Reckitt: We have taken learnings from our previous pilots and made plans to scale our latest generation of refill at home products where possible, across more brands and more countries, to increase impact.
• Unilever: To date, our most successful refill formats have been refill-at-home innovations, enabled by concentrated formulas. We have scaled dilute-at-home formats which use significantly less plastic; Cif Eco Refill initially launched in UK and has since expanded across Europe, and our 6x concentrated OMO liquid laundry detergent, has now been rolled out across South America and Australia. Dove Concentrated Body Wash brought dilute-at-home refill formats into Personal Care. It uses 50% less plastic than a standard bottle after two refills.

Hopefully it won't be too long until we can offer some of these brands in refill format.

Check out our sale on everything you need to get going with refills. It includes our Christmas Personal Care Bundle that includes stainless-steel, clear and amber glass bottles, stainless-steel push pumps and a range of personal care products to help you prevent plastic waste and smell wonderful. Perfect for that someone or family that has everything and wants to prevent plastic waste. And it's over 30% off too.

If you follow Bio-D, you may well see our stainless-steel bottles in its social media in coming weeks.

The idea of getting a stainless-steel laundry bottle for life is catching on. Use the bottle with Bio-D’s eco-friendly laundry detergent and it's a smart addition to any laundry room.

You save money on the product and prevent plastic waste. What's not to like?

Check out our stainless-steel laundry bottles here. And if you'd like to order one with Bio-D laundry detergent, we have a choice of Fragrance Free, or its most popular fragrance, Lavender.

Our new new stainless-steel laundry ‘Bottle for Life’ got some press coverage recently!

It was featured in a number of outlets, including the Yorkshire Times and Hull Is This.

All the pieces mention how refilling at home can help consumers prevent a substantial amount of plastic waste. A typical household purchases roughly one plastic laundry detergent bottles each month, creating 12 bottles of plastic waste each and every year. By using the stainless-steel ‘Bottle for Life’ and refilling from home, consumers can prevent this.

The bottle looks great too alognside our hollow stainless steel dosing cup, a UK first!

Learn more and perhaps buy a bottle here.

Silvertown, a premium brand made in the UK from high quality ingredients and presented in UK-made elegant glass bottles with a stylish stainless-steel push pump, is now available on RefillwithLESS.

The Silvertown brand offers gorgeous fragrances selected by professional perfumers. Hand soap comes in White Rose & Rhubarb and Tuscan Orange & Bergamot, and there is a Fresh Apple Hand Sanitiser too.

Named 'Silvertown' to celebrate the brand’s birthplace from which you can see Silvertown’s majestic and rapidly evolving skyline, running from the Thames Barrier, with obsolete cranes from the docks, the O2, the cable car across the Thames and into Canary Wharf and the city. Instead of using a panoramic photo, the wonderfully talented London-based designer, Sigita Budraitytė, prepared an elegant line drawing.

Read more about the Silvertown brand back story, including some of the history of the area, as well as see the full range of products here.

A hard-hitting Reuters 22 June 2022 report lays bare Unilever’s hypocrisy about sachets.

Reuters points out that while Unilever has been a vocal critic of sachet packaging it has been lobbying to prevent it being banned.

For several years Unilever executives criticised sachet packaging, saying it is “evil because you cannot recycle it” (Hanneke Faber, Unilever’s President for Global Food & Refreshments in 2019), and “We have to get rid of them… It's pretty much impossible to mechanically recycle and so it's got no real value” (CEO Alan Jope in 2020).

Yet an investigation by Reuters shows that “even as Unilever executives have publicly decried the environmental harm done by this packaging, the multinational has worked to undercut laws aimed at eliminating sachets in at least three Asian countries”.

Reuters goes on to give details of how in “Sri Lanka, the company pressed the government to reconsider a proposed sachet ban, then tried to maneuver around it once regulations were imposed, a senior environmental official told Reuters. In India and the Philippines, Unilever lobbied against proposed sachet bans that were later dropped by lawmakers, sources directly involved said.”

It’s a dispiriting read about a company that knows better.