The Power of Reduced Packaging

Making good products more affordable to low-income people can be as simple in some cases as reducing or eliminating the product packaging.

In the case of cleaning products,  the cost of the packaging of the final product can be many times the cost of the active ingredients inside the packaging.

Reducing packaging can have the following economic and environmental impact:

1. make desired goods more affordable to low-income people and, therefore,
2. improve the quality of life of emerging market consumers;
3. reduce oil demand and consumption (most consumer product packaging is oil-derived plastic);
4. reduce our collective carbon footprint, particularly as we make less demands on oil burning manufacturing and transportation;
5. greatly reduce the amount of plastic trash/waste that is too often not recycled but ends up, instead, on the side of the road or in empty lots.

Some companies make products more affordable by reducing the unit size, often down to one serving or use per package. For people that do not have $2 at one time to buy a bottle of spray cleaner or laundry detergent, paying 20 cents for one serving is more affordable. In the long run, however, these same people end up paying much more for the small packets of product than they would have for one liter-sized bottle, for example.  Plus, for every ‘one-less’ discarded plastic bottle, we end up with hundreds of foil packages littering the landscape.

A testament to people’s survival skills and ingenuity; many of those making only a few dollars per day and the bodega owners they purchase from, have come up with another way of making products more affordable.

Bodega owners routinely repackage name brand coffee, sugar, salt, even beverage alcohol from their original large bottles and cans into small, un-labeled plastic bags, about half the size of a sandwich bag. The practice is similar to the major consumer packaged goods company’s approach except that the product price is lower and the plastic bags are reusable.

In the case of our company, Options Senegal, we make high quality, green (i.e.. non-toxic) cleaning products affordable to low-income people in the following way:

1. we sell our products in super concentrated form to marketing cooperatives that, in turn sell the concentrates to local bodega owners;
2. marketing cooperative members demonstrate and promote the products to local households, encouraging them to purchase the products at their local bodega;
3. to make the products affordable, householders make a one-time purchase of a sprayer top and use it to cap a rinsed-out, liter-size soda, juice or water bottle;
4. the householder takes the bottle to the bodega for a “refill.”
5. the bodega owner pours an ounce of concentrated cleaner into the rinsed-out soda bottle and either adds water or suggests that the householder add the water at home (making the bottle less heavy to carry along with other items);
6. the bodega owner only charges the customer for the concentrated product, not the bottle or the water. By the way, did we mention that most cleaning products are 95% water?