We believe that cleaning your home shouldn’t make waste. Which is why we have developed a ground-breaking, fully recyclable spray bottle.

When you give a quick squirt of a cleaning product to polish the bathroom sink or clean the kitchen table, you probably don’t give much thought to the spray mechanism. But these ‘triggers’ are complex pieces of equipment, with several precision-engineered moving parts, including springs, valves, nozzles and gaskets.

On the one hand, they’re a triumph of innovation and clever design. On the other, they’re a problem when it comes to recycling.

A few years ago, although we stopped using metal springs, our triggers still weren’t fully recyclable, as different components were made from different plastics. We used several types because polymers have certain characteristics and are therefore suited to certain functions. For example, one part seals the cap, another picks up the final drops at the bottom of the bottle. In fact, our basic triggers have 11 components, and our more complex designs can have 15 or so.

The technical challenge
To remove the metal, we made a spring component out of polyoxymethylene (POM). However, when you put that with a bottle made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) – which is a common material used for rigid plastic packaging – the whole thing wasn’t recyclable. To recycle plastic, it’s sorted based on the material density and since both POM and PET have similar density, the recycling machinery can’t separate them properly.

To solve this conundrum, we worked with our supplier, Silgan, to come up with an innovative new trigger in which all the components are fabricated from either polypropylene (PP) or polyethylene (PE) polymers. These belong to the same group of polymers (polyolefin) and can enter the same recycling stream. In other words, the trigger is now fully recyclable alongside the bottle.

This move was critical for us to achieve one of our key business objectives: to design all our plastic packaging to be reusable, recyclable or compostable.

As well as switching to the new material, we also had to modify the design of the spring component to deliver the necessary functionality. We tested lots of different grades of PP polymers to find the one with best performance.

Cif spray bottle with recyclable trigger. Roll-out in Europe means that 160 million packs will now be recyclable every year.
Next job: to make it e-commerce compliant
For us to ship these bottles to our customers, we pack and stack them in a certain way to ensure there’s minimal chance of them getting damaged in transit. But when they’re sold online by a retailer like Amazon and Alibaba, for example, we don’t control the fulfilment bit – the packaging and posting. For that reason, the product must be ISTA6 compliant.
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