Refills

Recently, I bought a 16-ounce spray bottle of a new (to me) natural household cleaner.   When it was time to buy more, I found that this company offers a 32-ounce bottle of concentrated refill.  It takes three teaspoons of the concentrated refill plus 16 ounces of water from my kitchen faucet to refill the 16-ounce spray bottle, so the 32-ounce refill bottle is equivalent in product to 64 of the original spray bottles.  Using this type of concentrated refill has significant sustainability benefits.  First, it avoids the manufacturing energy and materials cost of making 64 new spray bottles, while making only one larger simple bottle without a spray nozzle.  The spray bottle I originally bought will be reused many times, so the energy and resource cost of manufacturing it is spread across many uses.  In addition, the energy used for transportation of the product is much less because the water to fill each of the 64 spray bottles is not trucked from the manufacturing plant to the store, although there is a small energy cost to get the water to my house. 
 
Refills are available for other products, although not as many as I’d like.  Some of them are concentrated product, some are not.  Even for those that are not concentrated, in most cases the refill bottles are simpler (no pump or spray nozzle) and so use less materials and manufacturing energy.  Refills are a good way to reduce use of energy and materials.