At the moment, Single Use Ain’t Sexy manufactures a single product. It’s a small white tablet, about the size of a peppermint. The magic happens when you add this tablet to water. After 20 minutes or so, the little disc dissolves and creates a foaming, pump-able, non-toxic and environmentally friendly hand soap.
This might not sound like a big deal, but it means that, when you buy a glass bottle from Single Use Ain’t Sexy, it could well be the last bottle of hand soap you will ever buy. So far, the community has saved over 68,614 plastic bottles from landfill. The goal is five million. Within 24 hours of launching a crowdfunding campaign in 2021, the company raised over $170,000. By the end of the first week? $700,000. Now the plan is to expand internationally – the UK and America are on the cards.
“Think of us as the Berocca of hand soap,” says founder and CEO Josh Howard. “By replacing your regular plastic, single-use hand soap bottles and using our tablets, you’re obviously saving plastic bottles from landfill. That’s the front end.
“On the back end, you’re also reducing your carbon footprint by not shipping water all over the place. Instead of, say, transporting millions of bottles on a ship or a lorry, we can move the same amount of soap in one or two pallets.”
“At the end of the day, we don’t have time to wait and fight over this stuff. You’ve got to be proactive and take action."
Josh is quick to point out that he was never an “eco warrior”, and is still far from perfect when it comes to sustainability. The idea for Single Use Ain’t Sexy was to prompt people to make small, incremental changes, in the hopes they’d eventually make bigger ones. “People might not start by putting solar panels on their roof,” Josh says, “But switching your hand soap? That’s so easy.”
The company launched just before the pandemic. Josh had been looking at a lot of cleaning products in the US and Japan and realised there was a gap in the ‘Just Add Water’ market: personal care.
“No-one was doing it with soap, at least not in a way that was scalable,” he says. “I looked around and thought, my god, there are so many plastic soap bottles everywhere. It’s crazy we actually ship water like this around the country. It’s a resource that’s coming out of your tap. You’re already paying for it!”
When COVID struck, Josh had been working on the problem for six months, developing a prototype and tackling the pain points: the tablets themselves couldn’t be toxic, and the packaging would need to be recyclable. He also realised that sustainability itself couldn’t be the only hook. His tablets had to be just as effective, just as cheap, and just as efficient as regular hand soap. Otherwise no-one would care.
"It’s true that businesses need to step up, but if they aren’t, what choice do you have? You have to try and make change yourself."
“It’s funny that you have to prove to people that it’s better or more efficient, not just more sustainable,” he says. “You can’t effect change until you’ve ticked all those boxes. That’s why we’re constantly improving the product, tinkering with it; kind of like a tech company improving its software.”
Single Use Ain’t Sexy is just one example of how organisations and individuals can agitate for change and lead by example from within traditionally non-climate-aligned industries. Great Wrap, who manufacture compostable cling wrap from vegetable waste, is another good one. These companies create useful, innovative products, but in a way, they’re also part of a cynical messaging shift, which began with ‘carbon footprints’: the gradual movement of climate responsibility from the corporate to the individual.
Josh acknowledges this is a problem – especially when 100 fossil fuel companies are responsible for about 71% of global emissions. It may seem like swapping your hand soap won’t save the world. But as far as Single Use Ain’t Sexy is concerned, it’s still worth the fight.
“At the end of the day, we don’t have time to wait and fight over this stuff,” Josh says. “You’ve got to be proactive and take action. It’s true that businesses need to step up, but if they aren’t, what choice do you have? You have to try and make change yourself. I think that’s why we’ve hit a nerve with people – they want to take ownership over their actions. And where better to start than at home?”
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