Ever wonder what the impact of refilling one product per household could have on what we send to landfill over 1 year? Well we did a little research and WOW! It just goes to show that our actions make a huge impact on the world around us + to those who have been refilling with us this past year and bit, keep it up!! We've already made a huge impact together! 

Before reading any further, we invite you to do this little mental exercise: if every household in Collingwood refilled shampoo for one year, how many dump trucks full of empty plastic bottles do you think would be eliminated from going to landfill? Then consider the same for Ontario, and then every household in Canada?

According to the statistics available, the 2016 Collingwood population was 21,793 with 9,550 households of 1 – 5+ occupants/household. It seems safe to assume the average household uses 6 x 500ml bottles of shampoo/year. That translates to 5 refills of 1 bottle per Collingwood household/year. Based on the assumption that each household averages 5 refills (of their 6th bottle of shampoo) per year, we have estimated how many bottles would be prevented from going to landfills every year, first for Collingwood, then Ontario and lastly Canada.

According to the website wastecare.com* (* https://www.wastecare.com/usefulinfo/PET-Plastic-Water-Soda-Bottles-Bale-Weights.htm), there are roughly 900 of the 500ml PET bottles compacted into each Cubic Yard bale (a dump truck holds 16-19 cubic yards).

The following shows the impact of every household refilling one shampoo bottle for one year:

2016 number of households in Collingwood

9,550 households

Refill 5 x 500ml shampoo bottles per year

47,750 x 500ml shampoo bottles prevented from landfill per year in Collingwood

53 cubic yard sized bales of compacted bottles prevented =  3 dump truck loads of compacted bottles in Collingwood prevented

Now, let’s see if every Ontario household made the same change, then every Canadian household.

2016 is the last year available for the Provincial number of households

5,169,000 households

Refill 5 x 500ml shampoo bottles per year

25,845,000 x 500ml shampoo bottles prevented from landfill per year in Ontario

28,716 cubic yard sized bales of compacted bottles prevented = the equivalent of over 1,640 dump truck loads of compacted bottles in Ontario prevented

2016 households in Canada listed as 

34,460,060 households

Refill 5 x 500 shampoo bottles per year

172,300,300 x 500ml shampoo bottles prevented from landfill per year in Canada

191,445 cubic yard sized bales of compacted bottles prevented = the equivalent of over 10,939 dump truck loads of compacted bottles in Canada prevented

To recap....

If every household reused + refilled just their shampoo bottle for one year, all of this waste would eliminated completely:

Collingwood - 3 dump truck loads

Ontario - 1,640 dump truck loads

Canada - 10,939 dump truck loads

And this is just for shampoo bottles. We hope this exercise helps to imagine the plastic pollution we would completely eliminate if we all started to refill just one bottle. But the same implications are true for conditioner, body wash, hand soap, dish soap, laundry soap, etc.

We always say to start refilling one product, it doesn't take long before you'll want to reuse + refill another product, and another after that. And that's certainly what happened for us! To everyone who is in the habit of refilling, keep it up because your actions matter!

And to those who are new to refill, we encourage you to bring us your empties + start refilling! We promise you'll leave feeling great.