Seventh Generation Zero Plastic Hand Soap Review | Zero Waste, Non-toxic Hand Soap
The Top Line: BUY. We love Seventh Generation as a company and love many of their great products — including the powdered hand wash. We like that it doesn’t dry out hands and you only need a little sprinkle to get clean. The one drawback is that you need both hands to use the canister, unlike soap pumps (we may be spoiled here). We look forward to Seventh Generation’s upcoming refills for their products since the price will come down even further, while keeping the same canister.
29 November 2020 Update: We’ve been using Seventh Generation’s Zero Plastic Hand Soap Powder for an other few weeks and discovered one extra perk: the granules subtly exfoliate your hands, leaving them extra soft!
The Breakdown:
Cost & Products: $6.99 for 12oz canister of Hand Wash Powder or $46.95 for the Zero Plastic Complete Bundle (saving 20% by the bundle) via the Grove Collaborative Shop
How ‘Clean’ Is This? Really, really clean - it’s Seventh Generation, so here are the list of accolades: non-toxic, no fragrances, no plastic. No animal ingredients and no animal testing, Leaping Bunny Certified, hypoallergenic, sulfate-free. Oh, there are also only 4 ingredients.
Whew… we’re sure we missed some, but Seventh Generation is one of the pioneers in green.
Packaging: Packaging is made of steel, one of the most recyclable and recycled material, according to SG. We verified by our own research here, here, and here. Quote from the Arch Daily:
“When recycled, the consumption of electricity lowers by 80%, causing a lower environmental impact and eliminating completely the extraction of raw materials.”
Purchasing & Shipping: We bought ours from the Grove Collaborative site, which we reviewed extensively here. $49 gets you free shipping, unless you have a VIP account.
Many of our tins showed up pretty banged up and dented — and when we reache out to Grove Collaborative to let them know what happened, they propmtly gave us store credit for our bundle purchase. A+ since we weren’t even asking for that.
Good to Know: The addition of Seventh Generation Zero Plastic Products may change our advice on the Grove Collaborative site. We still wish the site was better organized.
Extra Info: Seventh Generation is a Certified B-corporation. We love that. You can read about their mission and other values on their website.
FYI: Seventh Generation is working on refills for their canisters, including the Bathroom Powder.
What’s Your Impact? No plastic product coming from a company already really, really well-versed in making products safe, non-toxic, and environmentally friendly in every way possible.
The Experience
What we typically use: We have been refilling our glass soap pump with brands like Method, Mrs. Meyers, and any other drugstore brand that touts green ingredients in a refillable format. The powdered hand soaps we’d tried at ‘20s prohibition style cocktail bars or hipster type locations.
On the first pour, we used WAY too much powder. Only a small sprinkling is what you need to get enough lather going.
Hands rinsed clean but NOT dry. We were both surprised and impressed.
It’s a little combersome to pick up the tin with your hands, sprinkle a bit of powder, and then put down. We know: we are so spoiled with soap pumps as well as already foaming handwash!
The Cost
We checked out typical grocery store brands and other limited ingrediant hand soaps, like Cleancult, Grove Collaborative, Mrs. Meyer’s, Dawn, and Soft Soap. We assumed the powdered handsoap lasted 4x longer by weight. which means, 1oz of powder is equal to 4oz of liquid handsoap.
*We assumed that each ounce of powder hand wash is equivalent to 4 ounces of liquid hand soap, note not foaming hand soap.
Money Report: The Seventh Generation hand wash powder competes with the OG Seventh Gen Liquid handsoap as well as drugstore staple Softsoap. And it's even cheaper as part of the bundle. Note: we assume that powder hand wash lasts 4x as long as liquid hand soap. We think it’s possible that it may last even longer.
The Good:
✔ Leaping Bunny Certified: Non-toxic, fragrance-free and biodegradable ingredients
✔ Plastic-free - the container is steel which is one of the most recycled materials in the world
✔ Certified B Corp
✔ Only a small amount needed for clean hands
✔ Leaves hands soft - not dry
✔ Comparable price to Softsoap + the OG liquid Seventh Generation handsoap
The Bad:
✗ Need both hands to get soap!
✗ The container is not very pretty to leave on your sink
Our Recommendation:
We love Seventh Generation as a company and love many of their great products — including the powdered hand wash. Additionally, we look forward to Seventh Generation’s upcoming refills for their products since the price will come down even further, while keeping the same canister.
We're on a mission to reduce our personal carbon footprint with small, hopefully easy, changes in our home to fight against climate change. This means we're looking for products that may be all natural, ideally zero waste, reusable or compostable -- while still being affordable!
