Wash your hands: Dutch start-up Seepje meets COVID-19 soap surge through locally-sourced rHDPE

03 Apr 2020 --- As consumers are constantly grabbing hand soaps from retailer shelves to improve hygiene as part of containing coronavirus, hand soap companies are experiencing peaked sales and material sourcing hurdles alike. PackagingInsights sits down with Jasper Gabriëlse, Co-Founder of Dutch cleaning products company Seepje, who explains how his company’s 97 percent recycled HDPE (rHDPE) bottles are circumventing critical supply chain disruptions while offering an environmentally sustainable product, both inside and out.

“Worldwide, the demand for soap is greater than the supply and our hand soap sales have increased tenfold over the past few weeks. We launched two hand soaps at the beginning of November 2019, which are now the best running products in our assortment,” Gabriëlse tells PackagingInsights. 

Coronavirus-induced supply challenges
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced global economies to come to an abrupt halt due to the onset of national border closing, transportation restrictions as well as various levels of lockdown and quarantine measures. However, sourcing rHDPE locally from Rotterdam, the Netherlands, has notably led to much fewer disruptions in the supply chain for Seepje. “We use post-consumer recycled plastic, which comes from people using HDPE, so there is no decrease [in supply] there. It’s all in the local loop; we get the recycled material from the Netherlands, so we don’t have to cross any borders.”

Gabriëlse was inspired by a TV documentary to use natural rather than synthetic ingredients for a range of cleaning products. In terms of ingredient sourcing, however, importing the Himalayan Sapindus mukorossi fruit, whose shells contain the key ingredient to the company’s entire portfolio of cleaning products, has presented itself as a particular challenge for Seepje. This is particularly worrisome as Nepal and neighboring India are both in complete lockdown. Due to prior experiences with shells shortages, Seepje is currently better prepared to tackle the lack of access to its key ingredients.

“When it comes to the shells, the devastating earthquake in Nepal in 2015 taught us the lesson that we have a big risk sourcing from a country like Nepal. This is why we have a second and third mainland supplier. We also have a lot of stock in the Netherlands, so we have some space to cope with the current delays happening right now because of the lockdown,” Gabriëlse explains.

Due to current panic-buying of non-perishable goods and essential cleaning products, Gabriëlse admits that consumers might now be buying Seepje’s hand soap without being aware or interested in the story behind it. “We expect them to notice a difference when they use the hand soap and be pleasantly surprised by the use of only natural ingredients and how soft they are on the skin. We hope this will encourage them also to see the benefits for nature and people involved in the supply chain in the future.” 

Recycled plastics: rHDPE versus rPET
Although recycled PET (rPET) was a contender for a spell, Seepje ultimately chose rHDPE for packaging design and commercial reasons. “It’s possible to work with rPET but we wanted to make a completely colored pack and colored PET cannot be recycled.” Seepje uses 3 percent colorant to make sure all of its light-blue rHDPE bottles vibrantly stand out on retailer shelves, with a slightly darker shade of blue in the making.

The prospect of using rHDPE initially “scared” several packaging suppliers that Seepje approached back in 2016. “There was hardly any producer who wanted to work with us because it was fairly new to use rHDPE. They brought up really small things, like that the plastic bottles would smell bad and that there were residual contents that would burn in the process,” Gabriëlse remembers.

Eventually, bottle packaging company Hordijk, located just around the block from Seepje’s headquarters in The Hague, took a chance on the soapy start-up – without any previous substantial experience with recycled plastic packaging at the time. Their combined efforts won Seepje multiple international design awards, such as the Dutch Packaging Award in 2017, the Red Dot Award and the German Packaging Award in 2018.

“Now, recycled plastic is widely used and the price of recycled raw material has gone down because of higher demand. Almost everyone who can produce with recycled plastic will,” Gabriëlse affirms.

Seepje continues to reel in international awards for its packaging design. What counts as “greenwashing”?
Companies big and small are swapping out virgin plastic for recycled content alternatives. Although Seepje boasts a recycled plastic content of 97 percent, Gabriëlse applauds companies making similar yet smaller-sized commitments toward a more environmentally conscious future in packaging. However, he identifies the key difference between “green-thinking” and “greenwashing” by how companies choose to communicate their contribution to environmental sustainability.

“If you communicate ‘recycled plastic’ really big on your pack that is made out of 30 percent recycled material while you can easily make it out of 90 or 100 percent, then that’s greenwashing,” he underscores.

Simultaneously, he acknowledges that more prominent companies have a more complicated task when it comes to changing the recipe of their plastic packaging contents. “When they do change it, it has a large scale impact, but I am happy to see that big consumer products and brands are moving to recycled plastic on a larger scale,” Gabriëlse notes. 

The right to exist
Companies employing a captivating “Language of Environmental Sustainability” directly aligns with Innova Market Insights’ Top Trends in packaging this year. Arriving at retailers in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, Seepje’s 15 different cleaning products, soaps and detergents are based on the Sapindus mukorossi fruit shells – also known as the Indian soapberry or washnut – from the Himalayas in Nepal, that contain a natural form of soap. They also add natural, vegan fragrances for a pleasant scent.

Seepje’s collaboration with Nepali fruit farmers snowballed into the company’s efforts for more social inclusion, regional poverty reduction through fair wages, employing disabled workers and transitioning its transportation from fossil to biofuel. These sustainability strides grant Seepje what Gabriëlse calls “the right to exist.”

“I always say we are standing on two legs and going forward on two legs. One is the commercial leg because if we don’t sell anything, we can’t have a social impact at all. Without the impact leg, we cannot sell anything. It’s completely balanced and both are necessary. With every decision we make, we are trying to balance these aspects to do the best we can for people, planet and the environment,” Gabriëlse states.

While entertaining the idea of introducing the concept of refillability to all Seepje’s packaging in the distant future, Gabriëlse concludes that in the short-run, the company’s main focus is getting through the COVID-19 crisis. The long-term goal is to become the most inspiring and impactful detergent brand in Europe within five years – one soap squirt at a time.

By Anni Schleicher