The Bottle Was Never the Problem. It Was the Clue.

Tomorrow, 19 September 2026, hundreds of thousands of people around the world will head to beaches, rivers and waterways for the International Coastal Cleanup. Coordinated by Ocean Conservancy since 1986, it has become the world's largest volunteer beach and waterway cleanup effort, with events taking place in more than 100 countries. This year, volunteers already have a fairly good idea of what they're likely to find.

Ocean Conservancy's latest report, released this August, counted 1,338,712 plastic bottles collected by volunteers in 2025 — making bottles the single most commonly recorded item, ahead of cigarette butts and bottle caps. In 2025, roughly 630,000 volunteers across more than 100 countries removed an estimated 13.8 million pieces of trash from over 15,000 miles of coastline, according to the full report.

"Most bottles are used for mere minutes and yet can last in the environment forever," said Ocean Conservancy's Allison Schutes.

Ocean Conservancy looks at that number and asks how to reduce plastic pollution through cleanup, recycling, reuse, producer responsibility and prevention. We agree with all of it. But as a company that makes products traditionally sold in plastic bottles, we found ourselves asking a more specific question: did this particular product need a bottle in the first place?

What happens when you question the original design

There are many ways a company can reduce the impact of a product. It can fund cleanups and recovery. It can use recycled materials, reduce packaging weight, improve recyclability, or build refill and reuse systems. All of these can make a meaningful difference.

But there is another question that sits further upstream: what if the packaging problem begins with the product itself?

That's where re-engineering starts. Go back to the original design brief and ask whether the decision that created the need for the packaging was ever actually necessary. In haircare, that means questioning a category assumption made decades ago and rarely revisited: that shampoo needs to be a diluted liquid shipped in a bottle.

A conventional shampoo is predominantly water. Once a shampoo is designed as a liquid, it needs a container capable of carrying that formula safely through manufacturing, transport, storage and use — which is how you end up, reliably, with a plastic bottle. Change the formulation architecture upstream, and the packaging problem changes with it.

For the premium liquid user, a different question

If you already buy a beautifully formulated premium shampoo, the question isn't whether you care about the environment enough to accept something less. That's the wrong frame entirely.

The more interesting question is whether the bottle, and a fair amount of what's inside it, was actually necessary to deliver the experience you were paying for in the first place.

What re-engineering actually meant, in practice

We didn't set out to build a plastic-free shampoo. We set out to build the best-performing shampoo, starting from the actives instead of the water. What survived that process was a concentrated syndet formula — using the same broad class of mild surfactant chemistry found in premium liquid shampoos, without the dilution that made a bottle necessary to begin with.

Conditioner was the harder half of the problem, and it's worth explaining why. A solid conditioner still has to transfer cleanly onto wet hair, create real slip, detangle, and rinse properly — while remaining physically stable as a bar through repeated use. We built our system around Behentrimonium Methosulfate, the same professional-grade conditioning agent used in salon-grade liquid formulas, supported by cetyl alcohol, plant squalane and jojoba esters. The resulting bars are poured rather than extruded — a manufacturing choice dictated by the formulation rather than by the convenience of the process.

This is a luxury argument, not only a sustainability one

There's a version of this conversation that treats sustainability and luxury as opposing forces — where the responsible choice is assumed to ask you to accept less. We think that assumption has it backwards. Kiera Chaplin, in conversation with us for another piece, put it more precisely than we usually manage: "Make something beautiful, make it perform, and remove what's unnecessary — that's a formula I respect."

That's a fair description of what luxury has always meant, before the word got stretched to mean simply "expensive." The best version of most things is rarely the one with the most added to it. It's the one where nothing unnecessary survived the process. On that standard, a shampoo bottle was never a luxury object. It was packaging that outlived its usefulness by several centuries.

What the number actually says

The 1.3 million beverage bottles in this year's report are a record of something broader: how often products designed to be used quickly are still paired with packaging that can persist for generations. In haircare, we think that raises a specific question. Recycling matters. Better collection matters. Deposit systems matter. But a product company has a further responsibility that sits upstream of all of those: to ask whether the waste needed to exist at all.

In haircare, that question took us back to the formula.

The bottle was never the problem. It was the clue.

Find a cleanup near you

This Saturday, 19 September, marks the 2026 International Coastal Cleanup, with events taking place around the world throughout September. Since 1986, millions of volunteers have joined the effort — collecting waste, but also documenting what they find so that the data can help inform solutions upstream.

Ocean Conservancy's interactive map lets you search by city, country or beach to find a cleanup near you.

Find an International Coastal Cleanup near you →

 

Photo by Anne Nygård