The cleaning aisle, quiet champion of single-use plastic

We readily associate plastic pollution with water bottles, food packaging or carrier bags. The household products aisle slips under the radar. Wrongly so. Year after year, every home gets through a succession of rigid, short-lived bottles: a glass spray, a multi-purpose cleaner, a kitchen degreaser, a bathroom descaler, a toilet gel. Used for a few weeks, then discarded. That steady, invisible flow makes cleaning one of the great suppliers of everyday plastic packaging.

A plastic designed to be thrown away

The conventional cleaner bottle is a paradoxical object: sturdy, thick, fitted with a complex spray mechanism, yet designed around a single use of its contents. Once empty, it is destined for the bin. So a durable container is manufactured for an ephemeral content, and the cycle starts again with every refill.

In France, this packaging is managed under the producer responsibility scheme run by Citeo, which organises sorting and recycling. Figures published by Citeo and ADEME show real progress in the recycling of household packaging, but also its limits. Not all plastics recycle equally well: PET and HDPE bottles have good recovery channels, but spray triggers, a mix of plastics and metal springs, are often too complex to be recovered and end up rejected at the sorting stage.

The "it all gets recycled" myth

Sorting is good. But sorting does not mean recycling. Some of the packaging correctly placed in the recycling bin is not in fact turned into new material: contamination, mixed resins, no economic outlet for certain plastics. Worldwide, the OECD estimates that fewer than 10 % of the plastics produced are actually recycled, the rest being incinerated, landfilled or dispersed into the environment. Recycling is a necessary solution, but a partial one. It treats the symptom, not the cause.

The cause, here, is the continuous production of new containers. Every recycled bottle first had to be manufactured, filled and transported. The best waste, as ADEME tirelessly repeats, remains the waste that is never produced.

The forgotten hierarchy: reduce before recycling

European regulation and ADEME's recommendations alike rest on a clear hierarchy of waste treatment. In order of priority: first reduce at source, then reuse, then recycle, and only as a last resort recover energy or dispose. Recycling, the one advertising puts forward, comes only third.

The cleaning aisle has long worked against that hierarchy: produce a lot, discard fast, and absolve itself through sorting. Reversing the logic means tackling the first two tiers, reduce and reuse, before counting on the third.

Reuse the container, buy back only what is useful

That is exactly the principle of the refill. Rather than buying a complete bottle every time, you keep a durable, reusable container and buy back only the active material. The bottle becomes a long-term companion, not a consumable.

At Izzytab the bottle is designed to last and to be kept: it is bio-based, made from a polyethylene of plant origin, and built to be filled dozens of times. The refill fits in a simple sachet of tablets, without the weight or the bulk of a new rigid bottle. With every refill, it is not a new container that comes into the world, it is a tablet dissolved in tap water.

The arithmetic is clear: where the conventional model produces one bottle per use cycle, the refill model produces one bottle for dozens of cycles. Reduction at source stops being a slogan and becomes how the product works.

What to remember

The plastic of the cleaning aisle is all the more problematic for being ordinary: we no longer see it. Sorting and recycling are useful but insufficient, because they act too late in the cycle. The real answer is upstream: design durable containers that people keep, and sell back only the active material. Moving from the disposable bottle to the refill applies, at the scale of your own sink, the hierarchy public policy has been calling for over years.

Sources

• Citeo, *Annual reports on household packaging recycling in France*. citeo.com
• ADEME, *Waste, key figures* and the hierarchy of treatment methods (reduction, reuse, recycling). ademe.fr and agirpourlatransition.ademe.fr
• OECD, *Global Plastics Outlook* (2022): fewer than 10 % of the world's plastics are actually recycled. oecd.org
• European Waste Framework Directive (2008/98/EC): the waste hierarchy. eur-lex.europa.eu
• Ellen MacArthur Foundation, work on the circular economy and on reuse and refill models. ellenmacarthurfoundation.org

The percentages cited refer to the publications of the bodies mentioned and should be confirmed against the primary sources before distribution.