Less water, less plastic

481 billion plastic bottles were sold in 2018 — that's 1.3 billion every single day. Used to package everything from drinks and beauty products to household cleaners, the reality is they mostly hold water. Oil extraction and pollution are happening on a grand scale to house something most of us have on tap.

Founded in 2020, beverage brand Plink! operates under the motto "you bring the water, we bring the flavour". Its flavour tablets dissolve in water in around 180 seconds and use 99% less material than canned and bottled beverages, according to the company. Other companies operate on a similar model, aiming to save both water and packaging. Austrian company Waterdrop's 'Microdrinks' are small dissolvable cubes which users add to water, reducing packaging volume by 98%; Smol's multipurpose spray refill tablets remove the need to buy a new plastic bottle every time you need surface cleaner; and Neo by Nature's shower gel tablets are delivered in a Paper tube and designed to be decanted into its stainless Steel 'Eternal' bottle.

A reduction in packaging is almost a given for waterless design. One bottle of Moon Dust hair wash from US company Susteau, for instance, is the equivalent of four eight-ounce shampoo bottles. Or take Rollr, marketed as "the last deodorant you'll ever buy". Its stylish, refillable roller bottle is designed to be easily dismantled, allowing users to top up using a powdered, just-add-water formulation. "We tried liquid refills, crystals, and tablets but I can tell you with some certainty that powder is the best way to do it — partly because it allows for the least amount of material to be needed, but also because it means we can ship our refills in paper-recyclable packaging, making it much more likely to actually be recycled," the company tells PlasticFree. "By simply adding water at home, users save 95% more packaging compared to a normal deodorant and 80% compared to a refillable wax."

That's not to say waterless design eliminates plastic entirely. Susteau uses plastic bottles, and Plink! relies on a thin plastic layer to protect what is a volatile product. "There aren't yet any solutions for products like ours which provide a water and oxygen barrier to the degree we need to protect the product," says Plink! co-founder Max Luthy. "Our goal would be, potentially, to do a product that was less reactive that could go in, say, a tin, so you could send people refills." 

Less water, less carbon

Of course, not all products come packaged in plastic to start with. Many drinks and beauty products, for instance, are packaged in infinitely recyclable Aluminium. When that's the case, there are still environmental savings to be had by removing the water. "I'd been getting this dopamine rush of satisfaction putting my shiny LaCroix can into the recycling bin knowing 'Wow, it's infinitely recyclable!'" says Luthy. "Then I thought, wait a minute, it's madness canning this water and trucking it to a warehouse, trucking it from there to a store, and then driving to the store and bringing it home when we have good drinking water on tap."

With that in mind, Luthy had "a 'wake up in the middle of the night and start texting a good friend' type scenario. I said 'it's a bath bomb you can drink, low carbon footprint, low packaging, delivered by subscription, called Plink!'"

At 73 times the weight of a Plink! packet, a 12 ounce soda can is radically less efficient to ship. In a similar vein, Smol says its refill tablets result in a 91% reduction in carbon emissions compared to market leading surface sprays, while Plus — the maker of dissolvable, but plastic-based body wash sheets — says its product emits 80% less CO2 during shipping. In many respects, waterless design is lightweighting by another name. 

The new and the old

As it's a popular new term, the quest for waterless design is sparking a raft of exciting innovations across industries. Dryest Beer by German-based Klosterbrauerei Neuzelle is designed to be a "contribution against climate change". Not yet commercially available, the powdered beer — developed primarily for use by the restaurant sector — is added to carbonated water (or tap water in "exceptional cases") to transform into the amber-hued liquid we all know. At the moment, the beer is alcohol free, but the brewery intends to create an alcoholic beer which consumers will accept as a like-for-like product. Research is funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action. "Billions of litres of water are transported to consumers worldwide, because beer consists of up to 90 percent water. The time is ripe to put classic beer production and logistics to the test in view of the way we treat our environment," says shareholder Helmut Fritsche.

Over at the University of East Anglia, researchers have developed a new technology that turns beauty products such as moisturiser into a paper-like disc. Users simply add a drop of water to rehydrate it before use. As well as removing up to 98% of water from products, the technology also removes the need for preservatives. The team hopes it will help the beauty industry achieve net zero carbon targets. Meanwhile, even our sauces are going waterless, with AWSM from the US — which stands for Avoid Waste and Season Meaningfully — offering powdered condiments in paper-based sachets. One sachet creates 3.5 to 5 ounces of condiment when mixed with a third of a cup of water and shaken. 

On the other side of the coin are products we've known for decades, sometimes centuries. For instance, bar soap is waterless, so many waterless products such as Ethique's shampoo bars, ReMI's moisturiser stones, and Kate McLeod's Forest Stone lotion bar concentrate formulations into bar form. Flavoured drink mix Kool Aid, introduced in 1927, is a waterless drink, as is Crystal Light, launched by General Foods in 1982. Luthy also points out that tea and coffee are waterless, yet we don't consider them as such because they don't fall under the helm of new waterless innovation. 

Perfecting marketing and positioning

Luthy and his co-founders were, he says, "a little bit smug" about creating a product which solved so many of the environmental issues associated with the beverage industry. However, those issues simply weren't driving purchasing behaviour — the usual factors such as price, convenience, and flavour were. "The storytelling around environmental impact has moved from the front of the pack to the back of the pack. It's more of a reason to stick around. We have to give people a reason to pick the product up off the shelf," he says.

Designers' sustainable drivers for creating waterless products, versus consumers' more practical drivers — and the mixed perspectives around what's considered waterless — means that marketing and positioning perhaps need more development than formulations or recipes. A small bottle of Susteau sitting next to a large bottle of standard L'Oreal shampoo, or a small packet of Plink! beside a 12-pack of cans makes for a tricky sell, because to a browsing consumer, the larger product will look like a better deal. 

In the waterless beverage sector, an opportunity lies in the hype surrounding water recipes and social media trends such as 'WaterTok', a recent phenomenon that sees people mixing H2O with flavoured powders and syrups to encourage hydration. Concerns of high sugar content from medical professionals leave the door open for vitamin-packed alternatives such as Plink! and Waterdrop to gain market share. In beauty, powdered formulations could offer the convenience factor for travel when liquids are restricted, while cleaning products in tablet form are a great space saver for increasingly smaller living spaces. 

The environmental benefits of waterless design — whether new innovations or decades-old stalwarts — are inarguable, but for the category to succeed, the marketing must be finely tuned.

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