Mothers on tight shopping budgets have already calculated the cost benefits of concentrated products. A can of orange juice concentrate is half the price of a carton; condensed cleaning supplies offer a lot more per penny than their diluted counterparts—and no quality needs to be sacrificed because the end result is always the same. Huge savings can ensue, but for the environmentally conscious, buying concentrated also results in eco friendly home products.
The human brain is nearly 80% water, and just glancing at the label of any cleaning product will reveal it’s mostly water too. Packaging is expensive and often counts for a high percentage of a product’s cost, so when people buy a water-based product, a lot of their money just goes into packaging water. Since water is available in any home, that’s wasteful in an economic sense but wasteful for the environment too. Every extra cardboard box results in further deforestation, and every extra plastic bottle results in more chemicals pumped into the air.
In 2008, Wal-Mart began an initiative to sell only concentrated laundry detergent. They forecasted an annual savings of more than 400 million gallons of water, 95 million pounds of plastic, and 125 million pounds of cardboard—all from switching to concentrate in just one product. The environmental impact of that is undeniably tremendous, and it can advance if customers demand it. Shopping patterns dictate supply patterns. If going concentrate saves both the consumer and supplier money, and it so dramatically benefits the earth, people should choose concentrated products wherever they’re available.
