The Concentrate Approach to Eco Friendly Products.
Tri Nature has been helping to reduce the impact of household cleaning and personal care products on the environment for over 30 years. Along with their gentle chemistry philosophy, one of the other ways Tri Nature does this is by making concentrated products. Tri Nature’s Technical Officer in Product Development, Jaquie, tells us about concentrated products and how they can benefit the health of your home and environment.
WHAT ARE CONCENTRATES?
Simply put concentrates are products in which the active ingredients are at a higher level than those that would be found in traditional cleaning products. Traditional cleaning products often contain high levels of filler ingredients. For liquid products, filler is usually water and in the case of powders, it is usually an ingredient like sodium sulphate.
Tri Nature offers two types of concentrated products:
The first is our dilutable products where you add water to the concentrated product to dilute it to its useable form (For example – Supre Multipurpose Cleaner).
The second type is our concentrated products that are ready to use but you just use less than that of traditional cleaners (For example – Alpha Plus Laundry Powder).
WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF USING CONCENTRATES?
The most important way that concentrates help to reduce the impact on the environment is by eliminating unnecessary fillers. Reducing or removing fillers means that not only are we not wasting unnecessary resources (like water) we are also reducing transport impacts on the environment because we aren’t shipping these unnecessary ingredients.
Sodium sulphate is commonly used in traditional laundry powders as a filler to bulk up a powder and sometimes helps with making a powder free-flowing, but it does not contribute to the cleaning performance of a product. By never using this filler ingredient we are also reducing the amount of sodium that is released to the environment. High sodium levels can cause issues with soil salinity and limit the suitability of greywater for re-use.
By making concentrated products Tri Nature are able to reduce packaging thus reducing the amount of waste that will need to be recycled. This also leads to cost savings because you aren’t paying for extra packaging and fillers.
DID YOU KNOW?
You can do up to 160 loads of wash with a single 2 kg bag of Alpha Plus Laundry Powder - that is a lot of dirty laundry. Based on ½ x 25 g scoop per load of wash
You can also make 20 x 500 ml bottles of Supre Multi-Purpose Cleaner from a single 1 litre bottle of Supre Concentrate. Based on a usage of 50ml concentrate per 500ml Water in a spray bottle.
Ecostainable - Changing the world, one home at a time.