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Everyday swaps

Refill or concentrate cleaning products

Spray bottles are mostly water; refill stations, concentrates and dissolvable tablets cut the plastic to a single bottle you keep.

Swap out
New plastic spray and cleaning bottles
Swap in
Refilled bottles, concentrates or tablets
Impact
3 / 5
Cost
1 / 3
Effort
1 / 3
Grams of plastic avoided per person per year
500
Break-even
Refills and concentrates are usually 20 to 30 percent cheaper per litre
Watch out for
Some tablets come wrapped in PVA film, which dissolves in water but is still a type of plastic; paper-wrapped tablets or bulk refill avoid it.

Keep your existing spray bottles and refill them at a refill store, or buy concentrate sachets and tablets that you dilute at home. Algramo's refill dispensers in Chile show the model works at corner-shop scale.

A spray bottle and trigger weigh around 50 g; replacing six a year plus assorted cleaning bottles avoids roughly 500 g. Algramo's radio-frequency identification (RFID) refill containers reach about 325,000 customers through 2,000 stores and save low-income families around 30 percent on essentials.

The catch: some concentrate tablets come wrapped in PVA film, which dissolves but is itself a synthetic polymer; paper-wrapped tablets or bulk refill avoid that.

Page updated 24 September 2026. How we check sources