A plastic bottle washes ashore on an otherwise pristine beach — a reminder that ocean waste can travel far beyond where it first entered the environment. Image: Leisuretrade.
By Leisuretrade Editorial
Plastic doesn't recognise borders. Neither should industry's responsibility for the packaging it puts into the world.
A travel video from the Comoros Islands recently showed two very different images of the same country.
On one stretch of coastline, the beach was covered with plastic. The presenter was understandably disappointed. How could somewhere so naturally beautiful have allowed its beach to become so littered?
Later, he travelled to another part of the island.
The beach was pristine.
This time the response was admiration.
But watching those two scenes raised another question:
When we see plastic on a beach, how certain are we that the people living beside that beach put it there?
Plastic Doesn't Carry a Passport
Plastic does not necessarily stay where somebody discarded it.
Waste can enter waterways, travel through rivers and reach the sea. Once in the marine environment, winds and ocean currents can transport floating debris far from where it originally entered the water.
Eventually, some of it washes ashore.
The person standing on the beach sees the destination — they don't necessarily see the journey.
Inland waste → Rivers & waterways → Ocean currents → Another coastline
That distinction matters.
It is easy for somebody visiting another country to photograph a polluted beach and conclude:
These people don't look after their environment.
Sometimes local waste management will undoubtedly contribute to the problem. But we should be careful about assuming that everything lying on a coastline originated in the community beside it.
Some of that plastic may have travelled considerably further than the person looking at it.
Who Pays to Clean It Up?
There is another uncomfortable part of this equation.
Not every government or coastal community has the same financial resources available for waste collection, recycling infrastructure or repeated beach clean-ups.
Yet ocean currents do not distribute marine debris according to a country's ability to pay for removing it.
A piece of plastic may originate within one economy and eventually wash ashore in another — including countries with considerably fewer public resources available to deal with it.
So perhaps we should be slower to look at a littered beach in a less wealthy country and immediately blame the people who live beside it.
They may be responsible for some of what we see.
But they may also be cleaning up some of ours.
Which raises a much bigger question:
How long can communities be expected to keep cleaning up plastic when some of the waste reaching their shores may have originated somewhere else — particularly when those communities have fewer resources available to deal with it?
There Is No 'Away'
Modern consumption relies on one remarkably convenient idea:
Throwing something away.
But where exactly is away?
Plastic placed in a bin still exists.
Plastic transported somewhere else still exists.
Plastic escaping into a river still exists.
Plastic entering the ocean does not suddenly become somebody else's environmental problem simply because we can no longer see it.
Global trade moves raw materials, packaging and finished products around the world.
Unfortunately, waste can move too.
The ocean connects us.
It can connect our waste as well.
Manufacturers Have to Be Part of This Conversation
This is where manufacturers — including companies such as ours — have to be willing to look at ourselves.
APPLE & BEARS manufactures body-care products.
Those products require packaging.
We therefore cannot talk about plastic pollution as though responsibility belongs entirely to consumers, governments, waste-management companies or communities living beside polluted beaches.
We put packaging into the world too.
That gives us a responsibility to think about the materials we choose, how much packaging we use and whether some packaging can be avoided in the first place.
Our bottles use recyclable PET, and we have introduced 5-litre refill formats across our Body Wash, Body Lotion, Shampoo and Conditioner ranges.
The arithmetic behind those larger formats is simple but revealing.
Five litres is 5,000ml.
By product volume:
| Format | Product Volume | Containers for approximately 5 litres |
|---|---|---|
| 5-Litre Refill | 5,000ml | 1 |
| 300ml bottle | 300ml | 16.7 |
| 100ml bottle | 100ml | 50 |
| 30ml miniature | 30ml | 166.7 |
5 litres, four very different packaging models. The same 5,000ml of body-care product is equivalent by volume to one 5-litre bulk refill, approximately 16.7 × 300ml bottles, 50 × 100ml bottles or 166.7 × 30ml miniatures. The comparison illustrates why reducing the number of individual containers can be an important part of the hospitality packaging conversation. Actual environmental impact depends on packaging weight, materials, closures, reuse, transport, recycling and the complete refill system.
This is a volume comparison. It is not a claim that one 5-litre container automatically prevents 166 miniature bottles from being manufactured.
The actual environmental outcome depends on the complete system: packaging materials and weights, closures, transportation, guest-facing bottles, replenishment, reuse, recycling and eventual disposal.
Nor does putting a recyclable symbol on a bottle guarantee that it will ultimately be recycled.
Reduce Before Recycle
Recycling matters.
But perhaps manufacturers should spend just as much time considering what happens before recycling becomes necessary.
Can we use less packaging?
Can a larger container replenish another bottle?
Can packaging remain in service for longer?
Can fewer individual packages deliver the same quantity of product?
Changing one bottle or introducing one refill format does not solve global plastic pollution.
It doesn't.
But doing nothing because we cannot solve everything isn't much of an answer either.
From the 5-Litre Container to a Real Hotel Bathroom
This is where environmental ambition meets operational reality.
A hospitality refill system has to work for procurement.
It has to work in the stockroom.
It has to work for housekeeping.
And ultimately, it has to work for the guest.
APPLE & BEARS supplies King's Cross Express Inn and its sister property St Pancras Inn in London with APPLE & BEARS body-care products for their guest bathrooms.
At King's Cross Express Inn, APPLE & BEARS bottles are installed in wall-mounted holders within the hotel bathroom and shower areas.
It is a remarkably ordinary scene — and that is precisely what makes it interesting.
The guest sees the presentation bottle.
Behind it sits a much longer chain:
Manufacturing → Packaging → Bulk supply → Hotel → Replenishment → Guest
The 5-litre container largely belongs out of sight, on the operational side of hospitality. What the guest experiences is the final presentation of that supply system in the bathroom.
The sustainability decisions were made long before the guest turned on the shower.
That is why sustainability cannot exist only in a corporate statement or supplier brochure.
It has to work in the real world — in the stockroom, for housekeeping and finally in the guest's bathroom.
Sustainability Without Pretending to Be Perfect
There is always a danger that sustainability becomes another marketing vocabulary.
Green.
Eco.
Responsible.
Sustainable.
Those words are easy to print.
Real manufacturing is considerably more complicated.
In his Smart SME article Sustainability Without Pretending to Be Perfect, APPLE & BEARS Co-Founder Dean Butt examined the practical trade-offs behind responsible manufacturing — including minimum order quantities, working capital, internationally sourced components, packaging, transportation and the environmental consequences of producing more than a business realistically needs.
The principle is important:
Sustainability isn't about claiming perfection. It is about accepting responsibility for the choices you can influence and continuing to improve them.
Some components can be sourced close to home.
Others cannot.
The credible response is not to hide those compromises. It is to understand them, explain them and continue looking for better options.
An External Perspective
A company talking about its own sustainability decisions is one thing.
Having those decisions examined externally is another.
In When Does Local Manufacturing Actually Make a Product More Sustainable?, Unsustainable Magazine examined APPLE & BEARS as a case study.
The article challenges a deceptively simple assumption:
Does making something closer to home automatically make it more sustainable?
Not necessarily.
Where something is manufactured matters, but so do raw materials, energy, transportation, packaging, production volumes, product use and end-of-life.
Local manufacturing can improve parts of that system.
It cannot make the rest disappear.
There is no sustainability shortcut. The whole system matters.
Why APPLE & BEARS Supports Big Blue Ocean Cleanup
Eventually, the discussion comes back to the ocean.
APPLE & BEARS supports Big Blue Ocean Cleanup, whose work focuses on protecting oceans through cleanup, marine restoration, education and wider action.
Marine and coastal clean-ups confront plastic pollution at the point where it becomes painfully visible:
A bottle floating in the sea.
Plastic caught along a coastline.
Fragments mixed into sand.
But cleanup reveals something uncomfortable about our entire system of consumption:
Eventually, somebody has to deal with what the rest of us discard.
By the time a piece of plastic reaches a distant coastline, establishing exactly where it entered the environment may be extremely difficult.
The person picking it up may never have bought the product.
Their community may never have benefited economically from its manufacture or sale.
Yet there they are, dealing with the consequences.
Cleanup matters enormously.
But cleanup cannot be the only answer.
We cannot continually treat the beach as the beginning of the problem when it may be the end of a journey that started somewhere else.
The Beach Is the Evidence, Not Necessarily the Crime Scene
Which brings us back to those two beaches in the Comoros.
One covered with plastic.
The other pristine.
Looking at those two images, it would be easy to decide that one community cared and another didn't.
But ocean plastic is more complicated than a photograph.
A polluted beach tells us that plastic ended up there.
It does not necessarily tell us where every piece began its journey.
The beach is the evidence. It isn't necessarily the crime scene.
Perhaps that should make us a little slower to judge the people living beside polluted coastlines.
They may be responsible for some of what we see.
They may also be the people who wake up tomorrow morning and clean away waste that originated somewhere else.
For manufacturers such as APPLE & BEARS, perhaps it should change the question we ask ourselves too.
Not simply:
How recyclable is our packaging?
But:
How much packaging do we need to put into the world in the first place?
What Goes Around Comes Around
Responsibility cannot rest with one part of the chain.
Manufacturers make decisions about materials and packaging.
Retailers and hospitality businesses can consider reuse and refill systems.
Governments need effective waste infrastructure.
Consumers have choices too.
And organisations protecting oceans and coastlines are often left dealing with what escapes all of those systems.
At APPLE & BEARS, we cannot manufacture body-care products and pretend packaging is somebody else's problem.
Recyclable PET and our 5-litre refill formats are part of our attempt to address something within our control.
They do not solve global plastic pollution.
But imperfection cannot become an excuse for inaction.
And perhaps there is one very small thing the rest of us can do.
The next time you're standing on a beautiful tropical beach and a piece of plastic washes ashore, before blaming the community whose beach you're visiting, take a moment.
Pick it up.
Look at the label.
See where the product was made, if you can.
The label may tell you where the product was made, but not where the packaging entered the environment.
Consider how far that piece of packaging may have travelled before arriving at your feet.
Then put it in an appropriate recycling or waste bin where facilities exist.
Because the person cleaning that beach tomorrow may be picking up somebody else's plastic.
One day, somebody somewhere else may be picking up ours.
What goes around really can come around.
Plastic doesn't recognise borders.
The ocean doesn't recognise borders.
And neither should our responsibility.
Continue the Leisuretrade Sustainability Series
Real-world hotel evidence: Refillable Hotel Toiletries: What Sustainability Looks Like in a Real Hotel Bathroom.
Packaging and refill systems: How 5-Litre Refills Can Reduce Single-Use Packaging in Hotel Bathrooms.
Operational supply chain: Behind the Hotel Bathroom: How Refillable Toiletries Reach Hotels.
