Why our bottles are bio-based

A genuinely well-thought-out cleaning product does not stop at its formula. The container matters just as much, sometimes more. At Izzytab we made two choices for our bottles: design them to last, and use a material of plant origin rather than fossil origin. Here is the reasoning behind a decision that touches on ecology, honesty and plain common sense.

What "bio-based" means

A bio-based material is one whose raw material comes from plants or biomass, rather than from fossil resources such as oil.

Our bottle is made of polyethylene of plant origin. It matters to say this plainly: polyethylene is still polyethylene. What changes is not the molecule, it is where the carbon in it comes from. Instead of coming out of an oil well, it comes from biomass that grew, and that captured CO2 as it grew. The bottle behaves as before, recycles in the same stream as before, but its origin is no longer fossil.

A bottle designed to last for years beats a "green" bottle thrown away after a few weeks: keep the bottle, only rebuy the refills.

What we will not claim

The market is saturated with vague promises and unverifiable claims. We would rather set out in advance the sentences you will never read from us.

We will not say our bottles are "plastic-free". That would be false: plant-based polyethylene is a plastic, simply not a fossil-based one. Nor will we say they are "carbon neutral" or "zero carbon". Making an object always emits something, and French law now regulates that kind of statement very strictly.

And we will not put forward a percentage until we hold the document that proves it. The exact bio-based share of a material is measured, using standardised methods, and we are waiting for that measurement from our supplier before writing it here. An unverified figure left sitting on a product page always ends up turning against whoever wrote it. This page will be updated once we have it.

Durability before material

It has to be said bluntly: the most virtuous material does not redeem a disposable object. A bio-based bottle thrown away after a single use would make hardly more sense than a fossil-based one discarded just as fast. The real environmental value of a container is measured by how many times it is used.

That is why the Izzytab bottle is designed first and foremost to last. Sturdy and refillable, it is built for dozens of refill cycles. With every tablet dissolved in tap water, it is that same bottle doing the job again, and again. Its manufacturing footprint, incurred only once, is spread across dozens of uses instead of being repeated with every purchase as with a disposable bottle.

That combination, renewable material and long service life, is what makes the object coherent. Either one without the other would be half a gesture. And if only one could be kept, it would be the durability.

Keep the bottle, rebuy what is useful

The model is simple to live with day to day. You buy the bottle once. After that you only rebuy tablets: light, compact, with no new rigid container. The bottle stays by your sink, familiar, reused.

That shift, from disposable container to durable container, puts into practice the hierarchy public policy calls for: reduce at source and reuse before recycling. Here, reuse is not a militant constraint, it is simply how the product works.

Our transparency commitment

We commit to always telling the truth about our materials: the exact nature of the material, its bio-based share once measured, the bottle's recyclability at end of life, and the associated sorting instructions (Info-tri labelling, under the French AGEC law). None of this information is hidden, none of it is embellished. Trust is built on verifiable facts, not on slogans.

This article has in fact been corrected. It previously described a material our bottles do not contain. We could have quietly deleted it; we would rather say so.

What to take away

Our bottles are made of polyethylene of plant origin, and above all designed to be reused dozens of times. It is that twofold logic, renewable material and longevity, that gives the object its meaning. We prefer a modest, verifiable truth to a spectacular, false promise. Keeping your bottle and rebuying only the active ingredient remains, by far, the most useful thing you can do.

Sources

• ADEME, definitions and issues around *bio-based* materials and the circular economy (reduction, reuse). ademe.fr and agirpourlatransition.ademe.fr
• French AGEC law (no. 2020-105) and *Info-tri / Triman* labelling: sorting information and the fight against misleading environmental claims. ecologie.gouv.fr
• French Climate and Resilience law (no. 2021-1104), article L229-68 of the Environmental Code: rules governing carbon-neutrality claims. legifrance.gouv.fr
• ISO 16620-2 and ASTM D6866: standardised methods for measuring the bio-based carbon content of a plastic. iso.org
• Ellen MacArthur Foundation, reuse and refill models. ellenmacarthurfoundation.org

The nature of the material is as communicated by our packaging supplier. The quantified bio-based share will be published here as soon as we receive the corresponding attestation; any general figure refers to the sources cited.