Last year Grace’s mom gave us a gift basket from Bath & Body Works. In it were a couple of bottles of foaming hand soaps. The design of the bottle is such that when you push down the dispenser, the liquid soap foams on its way out of the bottle to your hands. The system works great; the combination of little things for this bottle is just right — each push at the dispenser generates just enough soap, not too much, not too little; the foaming liquid soap never hardens at the exit point of the dispenser (like traditional liquid soaps), which if it did, would then block the flow of the liquid soap, forcing the user to push the dispensing mechanism harder, making the dispenser to dispense more soap than needed, which then creates waste (on both the soap and the water needed to wash it off); the foam is easy to wash off and leaves a rather pleasant scent on your hands.
But of course, nothing can be this perfect when it comes to corporate interests v.s. human interests. As it turns out, the dispensing unit won’t foam any kind of liquid soap other than the specific formula supplied by Bath & Body Works. Sure this is to make sure people don’t buy the dispensing unit they invented and fill it up with someone else’s product inside. I can understand and relate to the market strategy. But surely, they make refills for those wonderful, perfectly working dispensing bottles!
F*&k, no. And that’s the part that really ticked me off about Bath & Body Works. They put all that R&D into coming up with this wonderful dispenser (or maybe they just hired some two-bit Chinese factory to do it) and a foaming formula that works, but they’d rather people throwing away perfectly working dispensers than to sell refill bottles for those units. Is it corporate greed or just plain stupidity? I am inclined to say B&BW is the latter.
In some European countries, providing refillable bottle designs and supplies is part of the recycling legislation. Simply recycling millions of bottles consumers throw away every year is no longer enough to curb millions of tons of perfectly reusable bottles going to waste. This was something that Brian shared with me when he started noticing Austria’s recycling policies. The United States, being the number one consumer waste generator in the world, should take a page from Austria’s recycling program in that aspect. Like Brian, I hate it every time we throw a perfectly reusable bottle away. Unfortunately I don’t see this as something that will ever be legislated in the U.S. because of powerful lobbying efforts driven by greedy corporate interests. What a shame.