July 17, 2022August 6, 2022

From Pollution to Solution

Sudeshna Naik

Masters of Development Engineering, 2022 Class

From Pollution to Solution: Designing a convenient, plastic-free spray bottle

DTP Team (From left to right): Sudeshna, Allisia, Mia, Thibaud, Akash

Plastic pollution has surfaced as one of the most pressing environmental issues, and the rapidly increasing production of single-use plastics has overwhelmed the world’s ability to deal with it. Every day, U.S. companies create more than 76 million pounds of plastic packaging, and only 9% of plastic gets recycled. The rest ends up in nature and the oceans. “Deplastify the Planet” is a one-of-a-kind project-based class offered jointly by UC Berkeley’s Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (SCET) and Schoolab, a global innovation studio. Here, students work with real-world companies with a single goal in mind — ‘deplastify’ the planet.

With rising awareness of the harmful nature of plastics, a growing number of companies have committed to reducing their plastic production and usage. One of them is Grove Collaborative, which believes that the solution to this crisis is to stop making plastic. Period. As part of the “Deplastify the Planet” course, my team and I were assigned to work with Grove Collaborative, a San Francisco–based sustainable cleaning company whose mission is to be 100% plastic-free by 2025. Grove, a leader in this field, has already taken the next step to minimize the usage of single-use plastic by creating cleaning concentrates in reusable glass bottles. But their products are not 100% plastic-free yet, and that’s where my team stepped in.

The challenge we were initially solving here was, “How might we design a plastic-free, circular end-of-life sprayer for their liquid products?” Our first thought was, “Great! This just needs to be replicated with bio-plastic, super-easy.” But we were wrong, and here’s why. Grove had laid down a list of constraints for them: the price needs to be around $2, bio-plastics are off the table, it must be just as convenient as before, must spray, be more durable, and have a circular life cycle. From these constraints, we narrowed down the challenge into a singular problem statement, “How might we redesign a new plastic-free sprayer that is ergonomically and aesthetically finer than the existing sprayer ?”

Grove’s current bottle and sprayer have nine parts. It’s very complex, and each piece is made of different materials, making recycling nearly impossible. To recycle it, one needs to take it apart piece by piece and recycle each part separately. Because most people can’t do this, the majority of these mechanisms end up in landfills. To align with Grove’s mission and brand, we decided to look solely into carbon-neutral and carbon-negative materials and ultimately decided on stainless steel and silicone as the best options. Stainless steel has a lifespan of around 20 years; after that, it is infinitely recyclable. Upon testing with Grove cleaning products, we learned that stainless steel is compatible and does not stain or corrode. Silicone is durable, flexible, and washable, which makes it ideal for this product. It does not support mycobacterial growth, which is perfect for Grove’s natural non-preservative products. It does not react with the current cleaning products and can be recycled separately after its life span of 10 to 20 years.

Final prototype: a plastic-free, circular end-of-life spray bottle.

To incorporate these materials, we started exploring various mechanisms and designs and realized that finding the best solution meant taking inspiration from the past — like using vintage perfume bottles — and from nature — the spray of a spitting cobra — and then incorporating a modern sprayer’s form and comfort. The final design was a novel mechanism that combines the best out of all the inspirations and opened the possibility for a plastic-free sprayer with minimum parts: a sprayer with an atomic bulb pump as a reservoir, which spits the liquid when pressed.

Compared to Grove’s existing product, our final design was as follows: the entire product consisted of just four components and could be easily disassembled — attributing to a more sustainable end of life. Best of all, it is 100% plastic-free.

Environmental consciousness is a goal for many companies, but because of issues such as budgeting, logistics, or convenience, they aren’t able to follow the path. However, our team provided a solution that was aligned with Grove’s goal of having a plastic-free product that satisfied all of its demands.

Grove’s manufacturing team is currently working on making the solution ready for mass production. This was a wholesome experience for my team and me, and in addition to winning the final pitch, we got selected as one of the finalists for the UC Berkeley and SCET- organized Collider Cup X. This competition is partnered with investment funds/angel investors who offer students opportunities for potential funding of their startup/student venture. This platform provides investment opportunities, incubation, and mentorship programs to scale this solution for building more sustainable spray bottles and ultimately help reduce the 76 million pounds of plastic packaging problem.