Saving the planet with eco cleaning products

Engineer Mark Sorenson and wife Ellie Brade are launching environmentally friendly cleaning products aimed at disrupting the billion-dollar household cleaning market, dominated by giants of the cleaning world.

This is an ambitious undertaking for them and their business, The Sustainable Care Company, to save the planet from more mountains of plastic bottles.

After spending more than $500,000 on research and development and on setting up a pilot manufacturing plant, their small team has just started selling online and hopes to be in supermarkets soon.

Cleanery’s personal care and cleaning products are delivered as a sachet powder which a consumer tips into a bottle, adds water and shakes, and then sprays to apply. ‘‘We started the business to address the horrific waste and emissions from shipping water around the world in single use bottles,’’ Sorenson said.

‘‘It is something that I have been on about forever. There is this essay that I wrote 28 years ago when I was in fourth form which talks about the packaging problem and I have been banging on about it since. And now we are finally doing something about it.’’

Sorenson said Cleanery products saved shipping billions of bottles of cleaners, which were 85 per cent to 95 per cent water, around the world to then become mountains of plastic waste.

The Cleanery products were not only convenient, easy to use, and pricecompetitive but cleaned a lot better than traditional products and contained no nasty chemicals, like solvents, he said.

Products for kitchens and bathrooms were being launched first, and personal care products would soon follow.

The development has been supported by grants from Callaghan Innovation and a new investor who will help them take the products to market.

It is not just any investor, but Peter Cullinane, founder of Lewis Road Creamery and its famous chocolate milk, a marketing master and past Australasian chair and chief executive of global marketing agency Saatchi & Saatchi.

Cullinane was approached to support Cleanery. He said he loved the ambition and science behind the company and its products.

‘‘I am a big fan of what Mark is doing and how he is going about it and I think that really post-Lewis Road I think I learned quite a lot during that time, and I love being available to work with people going on the same sort of journey.’’

He was happy to exchange input for equity and take a stake in the company relative to the work and value he hopefully could bring to it.

‘‘A company like this I think it has a very rosy future given that the category is so static or lacking in innovation, so I think this is an exciting journey to go on.’’

He hoped he could help the Cleanery founders avoid the pitfalls of startup businesses and take the opportunities presented. He could bring resources that would not necessarily be available otherwise.

Cleanery is one of eight companies chosen to take part in the Climate Change Accelerator programme, run by Creative HQ in Wellington and supported by Callaghan Innovation.

It launched online this week.

‘‘So it is a super exciting phase right

now. It is where the rubber really hits the road and have all these big investments paid off?’’ Sorenson said.

The cleaning powder costs $4 for a 20-gram sachet, which will create half a litre of cleaning product, and $9 for three sachets.

The business employed three of the country’s most respected scientists – David Hassell, Bernard Kimble and Dennis Macalintal – to formulate the naturally based products, Sorenson said.

The cleaning and personal care market touched billions of lives and was a massive global market of more than half a trillion dollars.

Their target was mainstream consumers wanting sustainable products and that meant the products really had to work because consumers were sceptical of new ones.

The company had had the products tested against household names.

There was an international test where materials were baked at a very high temperature on to a tile that water would not clean off and various products were used to see which could remove the baked-on material best.

Their product completely ‘‘ripped it off’’ while others did not, Sorenson said.

The company was now looking to raise $1 million from new investors to help it to scale up for the supermarkets here they were talking to and to start conversations with big overseas supermarket chains, Sorenson said.

In the next couple of years the company aims to establish manufacturing hubs in Australia and in the United States or the United Kingdom.

Sorenson said the compact nature of the product in small sachets, and the development and owning of the machinery and intellectual property to make it, meant it was much more cost-effective to scale up in international markets.

Cleanery’s cleaning product competitors had massive sunk costs in manufacturing, so the industry was ‘‘ripe for disruption’’.

‘‘So what we are doing here and what I have always wanted to do is develop a scalable business that is built on solving real problems.

‘‘Both of us are really passionate about the environment, really passionate about the outdoors and solving environmental problems is the key focus.’’

Callaghan Innovation put its support behind companies it considered would have a transformational impact, Sorenson said.

‘‘That is our story, we are technology driven. We have gone and developed the technology and the science and the manufacturing capability for a product that genuinely works.’’