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This is shampoo made with seaweed, lemon, and sea salt, and no packaging at all.
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Zero-waste products like these are supposed to reduce trash.
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We've saved literally millions of packages from landfill, and that's really important to me.
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But there are still billions of bottles that end up in landfills and on beaches every year.
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So, can recipes like this really help cut worldwide waste?
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We went to factories in Vancouver and Tasmania to find out.
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At Beauty and the Bees in Tasmania, a mix of oils and melted beeswax are the first ingredients in a shampoo bar.
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We've never used any plastic packaging, ever; we use only paper, tin, glass, or wood.
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Jill Saunders started Beauty and the Bees 30 years ago.
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Her products use only natural ingredients.
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It's entirely chemical-free, and the suds are biodegradable⏤that's very important, too.
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Clay from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco blended with castor oil makes the shampoo thick and foamy.
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So, he [is] gonna pour.
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Workers add Tasmanian leatherwood honey and lye.
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Lye is an ancient ingredient that turns the mixture into soap for the hair.
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The clay, oil, beeswax, and lye become a liquid shampoo that's then poured into a bin and wheeled into a drying room, where it sits for two days.
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Then it's cut and packaged into biodegradable boxes.
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Mass-produced shampoo often uses artificial foaming agents like sodium lauryl sulfate.
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Those go down the drain and can end up in the oceans.
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Saunders says that's partly why customers want to buy her bars, which break down safely in nature.
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She sells 100,000 of them a year.
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But that's still only a tiny fraction of the 2-billion-dollar shampoo market.
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It's extremely hard to get people to understand shampoo bars.
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People are beginning to understand, but it is still very fringe.
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Fringe because mass-market shampoo in plastic bottles dominated store shelves and TV ads for decades.
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A new shampoo with vitamins, minerals, protein, and a...
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But experts say a growing number of consumers, especially millennials, now want to buy biodegradable beauty products.
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This is something that we are seeing happen in the shampoo category where "how" matters, like how the product is made.
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Lush Cosmetics scaled for mass production years ago, and now sells about 20 million dollars' worth of shampoo bars every year.
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We have seen, really, a shift from customers, and more and more folks looking at how they can be more environmentally friendly in their own lives.
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Lush showed us how they make one of their top-sellers, the Seanik shampoo bar.
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This 12-disc lasts for 80 washes and replaces about three shampoo bottles.
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Sea salt, lemon and orange flower oils, and two types of seaweed.
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These are dried sheets of nori seaweed being fed into a paper shredder.
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They're added right at the end.
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The smell is quite strong; it'll remind you of sitting on the beach, hanging out by the ocean.
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The same kind of food coloring used in M&M's makes it pop on the shelves and online.
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Lush has sold 41 million of these Seanik bars since 2005.
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That's equivalent to about one-fifth of all the shampoo bottles Americans buy in a year.
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Multinational brands like Procter & Gamble and L'Oreal are also getting into the natural shampoo market.
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We spoke to Sonika Malhotra, co-founder of Unilever's "Love Beauty & Planet" line that launched in 2018.
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The shampoo bars sell in more than 40 countries and in retailers like Target and Walmart.
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So we need to track technologies where we are able to find materials that, sort of, replicate all of these values, these properties that this material has.
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And that's not easy.
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Unilever shampoo bars are still niche compared to their legacy brands like Suave and Tresemme.
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But the pressure to cut plastics is on.
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In 2019, a Greenpeace campaign tagged manufacturers on widely circulated photos of trash,
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and singled out Unilever as a major source of plastic garbage, along with Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Nestle.
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Now we can pick up our smart devices and look, like, hey, what's the brand's opinion on this?
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What does the brand do to limit waste?
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Unilever signed a commitment to eliminate single-use packaging, but little progress has been made.
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And plastics contribute to climate change.
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They're made with fossil fuels and emit greenhouse gases throughout their life cycle.
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Many countries have banned certain types of plastic packaging.
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When we think about real solutions, we have to look at systems' change.
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And who is accountable for that?
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It's corporations and industry.
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Break Free From Plastic runs beach cleanups where volunteers tally up the trash associated with specific brands.
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Break Free's global head of communications says all this plastic garbage won't go away with just shampoo bars.
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These sorts of products are still putting the onus on individuals.
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There is something really strong about wallet power.
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But it is a drop in the bucket in terms of the solution to be focused on.
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And small businesses like Jill's face obstacles to scaling up, like steep shipping costs and expensive ingredients.
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Her bar costs three times as much as Unilever's.
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Despite the challenges, Jill says her customer base is growing.
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Business is getting better and better and better as a result of the zero-waste consciousness and people's awareness that biodegradability is very important.
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So, the future looks extremely bright.
