Refill your single-use plastic bottles with personal and home care products at this truck

To tackle the threat of single-use plastic heightened during the pandemic, city-based start-up launches India’s first e-refill truck that let’s you refill home care products

You may not realise it but a typical household consumes an average of 840 plastic bottles of household cleaners every year. That’s 100 kilograms of plastic. It’s a fact Purav Desai informs us about, to only corroborate the need for what he’s working on. The 23-year-old Andheri resident is at the helm of Refillable, an initiative to eliminate single-use plastic through a refill delivery service for personal and home care products.

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All you have to do is order a cleaner or detergent from their website, pick an empty container from your home and restock at their refill truck — a first, for India — that dispenses these liquids. If you don’t have a container, you can also purchase one from their station. The agenda is to simply avoid contributing to landfill.

Part of Recube, a social enterprise founded by Desai, Nishith Jardosh, Anupriya Nayyar, Rahul Batra and Lokesh Sambhwani, Refillable was launched on World Environment Day ie June 5, last year. “When COVID struck and we were all locked down, the amount of plastic that was being generated in our homes was huge with masks, sanitizers and hand wash bottles. Our first thought was that all this is avoidable. So, rather than focusing on new materials, we went back to the old philosophy of reduce, reuse, and recycle,” Desai shares.

The refill truck has been in the works for the past three months. It was designed in-house but the venture sought direction from a consultant who was involved with another similar global project, the Chilean value-add vending machine Algramo. “We have CCTV footage that is recorded. The truck is fully sealed, and there is no contamination. Each batch of liquid that is dispensed is tracked. We also have periodic cleaning and the machine is retrofitted inside,” Desai informs.

So far, Refillable has been operating on a home-delivery basis where products are ordered in returnable aluminium containers. But this week, Refillable will make its way to Mumbai’s streets with COVID-19-related safety measures in check, covering the Mumbai Metropolitan Region and Thane. Nobody apart from the operator will be handling the dispensing machine, and the operator will have a mask, face shield and gloves on. “We’ll be conducting temperature checks on the operator, too. The customer also gets a batch code that shows where the liquid is being dispensed from. The payment can be done online but we will also be allowing cash on delivery, and on-the-spot booking,” says Desai.

Log on to: refillable.store

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