Enterprise: ZERO Wipes
What is their raison d’etre? To design plastic out of essential parenting products and solve the problem of nappy rash.
Georgina Carberry laments the fact 90 per cent of wipes are made from plastic and 100 per cent of wet wipes are wrapped in plastic. “Wipes are everywhere and our team estimates that 4 billion wipes go to landfill every single year,” Georgina warns. “Our company – ZERO Wipes – is on a mission to design plastic out of these essential parenting products. If the consumer is given a better choice, we can make a real impact, but how can a mum or dad at home make a good choice if everything on the shelf is still made from plastic?”
Not content with just making the product better from an environmental perspective, Georgina also wanted to solve the problem that she and many other parents have caring for their babies – nappy rash. “The nasty chemicals found in wet wipes are notorious for creating rash and irritable skin,” she avers. “Our wipes have zero chemical additives.”
Fundamentally, ZERO Wipes – whose launch and scaling have been backed by the support of angel investors who saw the urgency of the global plastic waste crisis – has taken the problem out of the product, rather than passing it on the to the customer and creating a need to deal with the waste the product creates. “Our wipes are 100 per cent plastic free and home compostable, so they are zero plastic, and essentially zero waste,” Georgina enthuses. “Our wipes are TUV Austria [an independent testing, inspection and certification company] certified soil biodegradable, so they will naturally break down in soil in a few weeks.”
“You can rinse and reuse them or pop them in the washing machine, extending the lifecycle.”
ZERO Wipes are made from sustainable wood pulp rather than synthetic materials, and come in a recyclable box rather than a plastic wrap. Because they arrive to the customer dry, there are no parabens or preservatives in the formula. This means parents can simply add water to use on their baby and eliminate all chemicals on skin.
“The other benefit environmentally, but also for the family budget, is that these wipes are super versatile and three times thicker than most wipes, meaning you can rinse and reuse them or pop them in the washing machine, extending the lifecycle from single-use wipes to multi-use,” Georgina says.
Georgina’s co-founder, Damien West, realised during development that the materials needed for the products to be plastic-free and high-quality didn’t exist. He has been instrumental in discovering and creating innovative materials and designing new manufacturing conditions to allow the products to be viable for manufacturing. “The plastic-free film Damien and team have developed to create a plastic-free wet wipe wrap is a global innovation that has applications beyond our own products,” Georgina explains. “We are now offering our innovative films and packaging to firms that are also struggling to find plastic-free solutions to suit their product.”
Sustainability is at the core of ZERO Wipes’ operations and extends to all business decisions. The team ensures all its packaging is plastic-free and has optimised its shipping methods to reduce CO2 emissions associated with freight. “We are constantly finding new ways to improve and hope to bring all our manufacturing local to reduce freight emissions in the next five years,” Georgina says. Other plans for the future include launching the world’s first 100 per cent plastic-free wet wipe packet, with production samples having exceeded every performance expectation. ZERO Wipes also has the first disposable plastic-free nappy in development, and plans to open ZERO Labs, which will offer the ground-breaking plastic-free films and packaging solutions to other industries and product applications, including some well-known brands.
This article first appeared in issue 43 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine
