28 November, 2025

How often do you think about plastic waste from your bathroom? Probably not often but you should. UK households use over 14 billion plastic bottles every year. Adding a recycling bin to your bathroom is a surprisingly effective behaviour change hack – but it’s obviously better to avoid the waste in the first place. 

Blackmarket offers an easy solution to one waste source: a refillable powder handwash. Instead of buying new plastic bottles, you keep one dispenser and refill it with powdered handwash sachets. Add water, shake, and you’re done. 

What makes this better than refill pouches that are already available?  Refill pouches use less plastic than bottles, but they’re made from multi-layer plastic films that are very hard to recycle. Most need to be sent back to the manufacturer or a specialist recycler, which rarely happens, so pouches still end up in landfills or are burned. 

Blackmarket’s handwash powder comes in a sachet that dissolves in warm water and becomes part of the soap. It doesn’t break down into microplastics; it biodegrades into non-toxic products. The box that holds the handwash refills is made of 100% post-consumer recycled material and can be recycled with your cardboard along with the outer shipping box. Their glass bottle is made in the UK, with 45% recycled material. It’s meant to be reused for as long as possible and is infinitely recyclable. 

Another important advantage comes through weight. The handwash refill ships in the form of a concentrated powder, so it weighs 95% less than premixed liquid soaps. Instead of transporting heavy bottles of liquid soap around the world, they only send the essential ingredient, and you add water at home. This simple innovation dramatically reduces carbon emissions associated with transportation

Small changes like this matter. If more people switched, we’d save millions of bottles and cut emissions. It’s a simple step with a big impact. 

By Tulika Agarwal