The tear-open wrappers on our just-add-water products are changing from a home compostable film to a processable soft plastic. It affects the six tear-open products in our range, and the transition will occur over the next 12 months.
We're making the change because the compostable wrappers aren't reliably keeping the moisture out.
We appreciate it's a big change and may feel counterintuitive to our mission to cut plastic waste. The short answer is progress over perfection. Below we shed light on what the film was doing to the product, what we've tested, what the new wrapper means for plastic in landfill, and what to do with our new wrappers.
Please take your time to read and understand these changes. If you'd rather watch instead, hear it from May (our Co-Founder) here.
The short version
Our compostable wrappers aren't reliably keeping the moisture out.
For some customers, particularly in the humid parts of Australia, moisture crept its way through the film. Sachets bloated, tablets broke down before anyone got to use them, and product quality suffered. Some of the war stories from our community are shared below.
We've spent years trying to make home compostable reliable, testing 17 different compostable films along the way. This includes combinations of PLA, starch and kraft paper to name a few. The most recent was a kerbside-recyclable coated paper, and before that a regenerated cellulose film. Both failed on water vapour and oxygen transfer rates.