Do you cringe every time you toss a huge plastic soap container into the trash or the recycle bin? I do, a bit, because I think how much plastic is discarded every day and what a problem it is to dispose of it all, even with good recycling in place. (According to the Clean Air Council, 2.5 million plastic bottles are thrown away every hour… just in America! One-third of American waste is packaging.)

What a pleasure it was to walk into the local IperSoap store (where you can find the elusive dusting wands I crave) and see a new display for something called Neutral:

What a great idea! You buy the plastic bottle one time, and then take it back to the store to be refilled with your cleaning product. I bought the hand dish-washing soap, and while it’s not the best I ever used, it’s better than the inexpensive stuff I usually settle for. So far they seem to sell just dish and clothes washing products, but that’s a great start, since those products usually come in really big plastic bottles.  As you can see, the product itself is not very expensive.

I hope there will be more of this in the future. There are so many things that could be sold without fresh packaging every time.  Here in Italy we use about a thousand different cleaning products (and spend a lot of time cleaning)… so it would be great to see more products sold this way.  We’d be doing old Mother Earth a great big favor.