Hacker News Reader

Comment by xfitm3 | Hacker News Reader

The article suggests glass shampoo bottles? No thanks. Plastic is a great material, it is just abused.

The article suggests glass bottles and refilling them from bulk packages. No reason you shouldn't refill plastic bottles from bulk packages if you're worried about dropping the glass.

Getting a bulk supply that doesn't use plastic (or send you to some funny store that you have to drive further to and that costs more) is presumably the hard part...

Shampoo is a scam anyway. I've started using a bar of soap on my hair and it's just as clean and soft as it ever was. Just lather it in your hands before scrubbing your hair.

Shampoo should be illegal. That stuff is crazy toxic, we shouldn't be systematically dumping all those chemicals into the water supply.

Natural soap does work well on hair.

> Natural soap

Soap occurs in nature?

In small quantities, sure.

It's hypothesized that soaps originally formed accidentally when basic rain runoff from expired camp fires chemically interacted with animal fats. Roman sources certainly document the production of soap from tallow and ash, which is a circumstance that could conceivably arise by chance in aftermath of a camp fire. Perhaps that's not natural, or maybe we can theorize some sort of wildfire scenario causing the same circumstance.

Regardless, I think his point is that shampoo as we know it today is very much a product of the modern marketing/industrial complex.

Aren't these sort of bottles the kind of plastic that recyclers actually make a profit from anyway?

Plastic avoidance should first target plastics that can't be recycled.

Plastic is not a great material for the environment and your comment illustrates the crux of the issue for humanity. We tend to optimize for local maxima and not global ones. As other commenters have pointed out pricing in externalities would be a great step forward. Plastic shampoo containers may not be so great in your eyes if their cost became prohibitively expensive.

Plastic is a great material for some uses, but it’s also a very durable material. I’d love to purchase shampoo in the form of a refill of the plastic shampoo bottle I’ve already purchased some months ago. Why buy a new bottle every time? That’s the part which doesn’t make sense.

What would the refill package look like?

Same way a glass shampoo bottle refill package would look like?

A large vat at the store, with a spigot to refill the bottle you brought with you. I've seen this for cooking oils and honey, not sure it exists for cosmetic products.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com