20 Jan 2025
Welcome to January’s smoltalk! We’re back from our Christmas break bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, to quench your desire for sustainable cleaning news, hacks and myth-busting. So grab a cuppa, sit back and discover what Keep Britain Tidy wants us ALL to do in 2025, how last year was a year like no other for smol, PLUS the money-saving hack Flash DOESN’T want you to see!
Let’s kick off 2025 with a smoltalk that’s sure to thrill.
The Keep Britain Tidy logo is instantly recognisable, it even has a name; Tidyman!
If Tidyman could talk, we wondered what he’d want us all to do in 2025?… so, we asked KBT and they gave us 3 easy ideas that could make a BIG difference if we all got onboard:
1. avoid buying new where you can.
We want to waste less, making the most of the stuff we already own, and cutting our carbon footprint. Consider donating what you no longer need instead of throwing it away, try upcycling old furniture, repairing faulty items, borrowing tools from a lending library and even renting!
2. join a local litter picking group.
This gentle form of exercise makes an immediate, visible difference; increasing the sense of pride we feel about the area in which we live. Why not pledge to pick a bag in this year’s Great British Spring Clean from March 21 to April 6. Litter-picking can help impact health, lets us reconnect with nature and improves our wellbeing.
3. reuse & refill.
According to KBT, every year, the average UK person uses 150 plastic bottles, and 5.5 BILLION plastic bottles are littered, incinerated or sent to landfill. By switching to reusable water bottles we could save almost 7 tonnes of plastic from entering rivers and oceans each year! You can also get milk delivered in glass bottles and use refill shampoos and cleaning products.
Flash designed their Powermop (a spray mop) so it can ONLY be used with their SINGLE-USE plastic bottles. A big 👎 to Procter & Gamble for putting plastic before planet. It’s not hard to make bottles refillable… we’ve done it for years!
Flash would prefer we throw out our empties without refilling and reusing them and at £4 a pop ¹ they’ve put profits before planet too.
Want a clever hack to refill your Flash Powermop bottle? Here you go:
step 1.
Remove your empty bottle and put the kettle on to boil. There’s no time for a cuppa yet… but you do need boiling water.
step 2.
Stand your bottle top down in a bowl and carefully pour in your boiling water so the level comes just above the bottle cap. You want to heat up the cap but not the entire bottle.
step 3.
Hold the bottle cap in the water for at least 1 minute. Remove from the water and use a towel to hold the bottle cap while you twist it off. If at first you don’t succeed - try again! And leave the cap in the water a little longer this time. Eventually you should find it twists off.
step 4.
Grab your smol refillable floor cleaner - at just £1.10 for each tiny refill tablet, some water from your tap will give you 500ml of fantastic floor cleaning solution. Refill the flash bottle.
step 5.
Screw the cap back on and insert your freshly refilled bottle into your Flash Powermop. You’re done! You’ve earned that cuppa now.
Do you know your way around prescriptive analytics, data mining and analysis of covariance? No, us neither. Thank goodness we have a data analyst called Mike! We’re sharing his stats right here…
can you give a brief description of your job?
As a team, we answer business questions using data. We want to understand our customers as much as we can in order to bring them the best possible service. It’s all about using numbers to help us know what we’re doing well and what we could do better.
what’s your favourite smol product and why?
I love the soap magnets. It’s just such a clever concept. I even use one to stick my toothbrush on the mirror.
what’s the best bit about your job and working for smol?
I love problem solving and variety. For a fairly simple business, the way we think about things is pretty innovative, so there are a surprising number of new things to work on, and from all around the business. It’s also incredibly important to me that the work I do has a positive impact on the world and that’s baked into the very fabric of smol, and we genuinely care about our impact which is awesome.
what’s a handy eco-friendly tip you can share for household cleaning?
During the summer, I use the water from the washing-up bowl to water the plants. smol’s washing up liquid is powered by plants so can be used in the garden (although don’t use it on fruit and veg). Also spent coffee grounds are great for cleaning persistent grease off your hands.
it’s the weekend... where will we find you and what are you doing?
I live in London, but love getting out of the city, so probably in the countryside and possibly on a bike ride or swimming in the sea
How about a round-up of last year? Because it was a good one! Thanks to tremendous smol customers like YOU that said YES to planet-friendlier cleaning and giving back to others we made such a difference throughout 2024. It definitely proves there’s strength in numbers.
In just 12 months we dispatched over 8 MILLION smol packs to our fabulous customers! And here’s an image… if we stood them all end to end it would be 22 x the height of Mount Everest! All those packs made a real difference to the planet because they represent real savings. Throughout 2024 our smol packs saved over:
470 tonnes of plastic
970 tonnes of chemicals
4,913 tonnes of carbon
2024 also saw us install another 36 free-to-use mini launderettes as part of our ongoing Suds in Schools scheme. These will help hundreds more children living in hygiene poverty access clean uniforms and brings our grand total of these sites to 100. We hope to open even more through 2025.
Together with our customers we have also donated an OUTSTANDING 1.4 MILLION washes to The Hygiene Bank charity to support communities around the UK .
And there were some new faces to the range last year. We’re tackling the plastic around our sinks with our refillable foaming handwash AND our fabulous fabric conditioner became even more FAB with the introduction of 2 new fragrances. Now your clothes can smell outdoorsy, cosy or bloomin’ lovely without the animal fat and at just 9p per wash. Lovely!
Which all goes to say, we’re ready for 2025. Watch this space for an amazing year ahead.
It’s good to know that here in the UK, cleaning products - as finished items - CANNOT legally be tested on animals.
But there’s a loophole.
Despite the ban on the testing of finished products, individual ingredients that go into these products can STILL be tested on animals.
This scenario usually happens when certain chemicals must undergo safety assessments to make sure they meet health & safety or environmental laws.
So here’s where YOU might be misled by a brand. Cleaning items could well be advertised as "cruelty-free" because the final product was indeed not tested on animals. BUT it could contain ingredients that were absolutely just recently tested on animals.
It’s a “get-out” that many brands lean on because companies are not legally obliged to disclose details about their animal testing for household ingredients. ²
THANK GOODNESS smol products have always been Leaping Bunny approved as cruelty-free. It’s the gold standard globally for products that are NOT tested on animals - including all ingredients. In fact we’ve just had our certification renewed and we’re happily hopping about with pride!
If cruelty-free products are important to you… look for the Leaping Bunny symbol. You’ll find it on all smol packs.
Noses at the ready! smol fabric conditioner now comes with TWO NEW scents, joining our original fave for the ultimate scent-sational experience.
The outdoorsy one: our original fresh, breezy vibes with apple, orange blossom and all that jasmine. It’s like your laundry line-dried in the sunshine.
The bloomin’ lovely one: summertime straight from the bottle. It’s a flowery, fragrant fiesta, packing a real rosey posey for your nosey.
The cosy one: settle down for softly sweet, soothing scents and some big comfy hugs of warm vanilla.
Want to know what else is fab?
- Long-lasting freshness locks into fibres, with scent released on every touch.
- Animal fat-free: plant-based softeners for total laundry luxury.
- Big brand prices: just 9p per wash. Fab and friendly on your wallet.
- Refill, not landfill: recycled bottles and refills. Bye-bye single-use plastic bottles!
- Super concentrated: Just 4 pumps per wash, lasting for months. More fab, less fuss!
Ready to give your laundry a scent-sational upgrade? Go and pick your fave!
That’s all for now, but for more smol news before the next smoltalk - why not check out our private community group on Facebook: smol hacks; tips and tricks. We’ll see you there!
¹ Sainsbury’s November 2024
² RSPCA and Naturewatch
³ Ecorefill.biz
⁴ (based on 2 pumps of each product per hand wash).