Social media is filled with companies that want to help us live more sustainably. Companies that help us compost our food waste. Companies that let us recycle old clothing and textiles. And companies that want to move us off of single-use plastics and onto reusable alternatives. Today’s SioS feature, Blueland, is such a company.
Blueland is an eco-friendly cleaning company that wants to change the way you use cleansers, soaps, and detergents. The company is focused on eliminating single-use plastics and using eco-friendly chemicals and less water to produce its cleaning supplies. And they claim that they can accomplish these goals without any loss of quality.
The process is simple: Since cleaning supplies are mostly water, Blueland produces cleaning tablets that you mix with your own water. Just drop the tablet into the provided glass container and let it dissolve. Shipping tablets takes less space than shipping liquid filled bottles, so you also save on shipping costs and the carbon associated with transporting those products.
To start with Blueland, I selected a starter kit for both hand soap and a clean up kit. The hand soap kit came with two glass bottles and a selection of tablets to create foaming hand soap. The clean up kit contains glass, bathroom, and multi-surface cleaner and the accompanying tablets. So let’s talk about the quality of the products.
I don’t love floral scents, so that eliminated most of Blueland’s fragrance choices. But the Perrine Lemon and Satsuma Mandarin both have a citrus fragrance that I liked. The Mandarin fragrance was subtle and a little musky.
The soap works well. It’s not drying. The fragrance isn’t too strong. And the formula rinses clean with no sticky residue. For me, this product is a winner.
The cleaning products for home were a bit more hit and miss. The glass cleaner works well. The multi-surface spray is fine for wiping down countertops or cleaning up a spill, and I like that I can use it on wood without switching to a different cleaner. But the bathroom cleaner was lackluster. It wasn’t strong enough to get through soap scum in my shower or clean up all the toothpaste residue on the faucet.
As for the scents, the glass cleaner is fragrance free. The multi-surface has a great lemon scent that I actually enjoy. And the cleaners are made without parabens, bleach or ammonia, so they don’t burn your nose the way so many cleaners do.
Now, let’s talk about costs. The starter kits for three cleaning products and two hand soaps cost $29. But the bulk of those costs are in the glass bottles. Once you get to buying the refills, they run <$10 each.
A bottle of hand soap in our kitchen lasted about two months. So the product will run us around $18 per year after buying the bottles, which are made from glass that is very substantial and easy to clean. So when you consider that a plastic bottle of cleaner at Target can run anywhere from $4-$10, these are a bit more but not outrageously more expensive.
Bottom Line: I like the products. I like the sustainable message. And I wasn’t gobsmacked by the price. I liked them enough, that I already bought the detergent (which has no dyes or fragrances). The products are pretty good and being able to subscribe to refills means I won’t worry about running out.
{Like all Saw It On Social posts, I bought these products with my own money. No gifts or sponsorships were accepted. This post uses affiliate links that would be available to any Rewardstyle member and may generate commission if you buy soap or other products from Blueland.}
I’ve been using a brand with the same refillable bottle, “we don’t ship water” model but is totally non-toxic since May 2020. Started using their products bc I’ve been trying to get pregnant for a long time and wanted to reduce toxic chemicals in my house, but I also love the simplicity of only having a few cleaning products that all get refilled from the same concentrate. I’ve found their products work really well too. Their sheet-whitener doesn’t quite do what oxi-clean can do, but honestly I prefer the peace of mind that I’m not sleeping on chemicals.
Which brand is this? I’m interested in checking it out!
Thanks for the review. I’ve been wanting to try Blueland after I finish all the products I already have. FYI, you also up-cycle your finished spray bottles and soap dispensers instead of getting the Blueland ones. Other sustainable brands that I highly recommend are dropps (dishwasher and laundry detergent), plaine products (personal care products that use a refill system), who gives a crap (sustainable toilet paper). I know this really isn’t on-brand for you, but would love to see more sustainable content when it makes sense!
I also tried BlueLand recently to help reduce my purchases of single use plastics. I’m a fan of the hand soap, glass cleaner, multi-surface cleaner and dish soap. I did not like the laundry detergent at all, however. The tablets did not dissolve properly in my high efficiency front loader, even when following the directions to a T.
I have been using Blueland for about two years or so. I love the hand soap. The glass bottles are great, I enjoy the soap, and I think it’s cost-effective and environmentally friendly. I also found the house cleaners to be hit and miss.
The plastic/acrylic bottles break fairly easily. I dropped and broke a multi-surface cleaner bottle and replaced it. Then a bathroom bottle broke and the sprayer broke on the new multi-surface bottle. I wrote them, and they were going to send me a new bathroom bottle and a new sprayer, but I never received them (didn’t realize at first). I have tons of the refills, so I need to find some bottle to use them in, but I’m tired of trying to make their bottles work. It’s not cheaper or environmentally friendly if I have to replace their bottles frequently.
We’ve been using the hand soap tablets for months now and still like them. Initially was using the dish soap powder for hand washing dishes but stopped purchasing this. Just about every time we used it, we felt like we were breathing it in and then we coughed for several minutes. It became kind-of unnerving when it happened repeatedly.
I have been using Blueland hand soap for about a year and a half and I really like it. I have also tried their dishwasher and laundry tabs, but neither of those worked well. In fact, I have tried a large number of eco-friendly dishwasher and laundry tabs and none has worked anywhere near as well as traditional cleaners. I am using 7th generation liquid detergent in a plastic bottle for laundry now, but for dishes I went back to Cascade. I got tired of saying to my husband “These work great; you just have to completely scrub the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher.”
As a Canadian, I found that the exchange rate and shipping for Blueland made it cost at least twice the price of what I would pay in the store for these products in plastic packaging. BUT, many cities have refilleries or bulk stores. As an alternative I now get cleaning supplies through these stores in returnable glass bottles.
Is there some trick to the hand soap? I find it too watery. I like all of their other products.
I overfilled the water the first time, there’s a line on the side to let you know how much to add. I find it to be a pretty standard foam soap.
I know it makes for a good sustainability story, and eliminating single use plastics is great. But beyond that there’s not much clear evidence that bar/tablet cleansers require any less C02 to make, transport, use, and dispose of. It takes a lot of energy to turn a liquid into a powder and compress it during the manufacturing phase. And according to their website they manufacture their glass bottles in China, so they’re shipping them halfway around the world.
More and more born-social direct-to-consumer companies will be spinning sustainability stories like this. Be skeptical. Ask for solid life cycle assessment data.
The more you convince people to start looking at things like transportation costs, single use plastics, the more knowledgeable they’ll become and the more they’ll demand change. If you’re forcing them to seek out perfect solutions or near perfect ones, you’ll have a much harder time moving in that direction because people don’t have time or bandwidth for each decision to turn into a scavenger hunt.
Thank you for replying.
I fully agree, the perfect can’t be the enemy of the good. Something is better than nothing.
And Blueland seems like a legit company trying to do something.
But there is a lot of greenwash out there in personal product D2C marketing. You do such a good job of objectively evaluating products. Why not bring that no-BS approach to evaluating social/environmental benefit claims too? You have the exact right voice to do it.
I’ve been using the Blueland foaming hand soap tablets for a while, I just put them in my existing Bath & Body Works dispensers and they work great. They are a little more watery than BB&W soap, and don’t last quite as long, but I buy the tablets in the biggest package possible to make them the cheapest and have decided that the amount of plastic we conserve is worth it.
I picked up this multiuse spray bottle from CVS and have been pleasantly surprised. It’s advertised as non-slip and shatter resistant. It’s worked well so far!
https://www.cleancult.com/products/refillable-all-purpose-cleaner-spray-bottle-mosaic-clay?nd=1&ns=1&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=shopping&gclid=CjwKCAjwx8iIBhBwEiwA2quaq0he2f-pu45BCPbJ–qqbH2S2_58yxYLFeI9szNGIYStNW_6t4hROhoCRvcQAvD_BwE
This was my exact experience. The hand soap is great, the glass cleaner is too, the multi surface is fine for most things but sometimes you still need 409, and the bathroom cleaner is a giant miss and I’ll probably never finish it.
I have had good luck with the dishwasher tablets on the whole. A contributing factor may be that my apartment’s old dishwasher needs most items rinsed anyways.
In any case, I may still use things like 409 and Cascade, but I can intermix them with the Blueland products to reduce my overall single-use plastic consumption and that feels like a win.
I haven’t used Blueland, but have tried out the same idea using Grove products for cleaning. It is the same idea, they have refillable glass bottles that you fill up using concentrates (in glass) and then recycle. Their dish and hand soap come in aluminum bottles to recycle. I’ve been really happy with it and love not buying my cleaning supplies in plastic bottles! Cool feature idea, Belle.
Same here, I really like Grove’s model! And if you wait for a deal you can usually get the spray bottles for free as a starter gift.
Thanks for sharing your experience! I had been wondering about their products. I have also had great experience, like another reader, with branch basics which is a “Made Safe” product here in the USA. Their bathroom cleaner (it’s all the same concentrate with different levels of dilution) has been amazing to clean the grout in my bathroom floors and many other things. Thanks for sharing another product and giving us your honest opinion!
We’ve been using Blueland for… a year or two now, I think. Love the hand soaps, and are OK with the multi-surface for what we use it for on a daily basis (wiping down countertops). Did not care for the dish washing powder, but the dish washer tablets work pretty well.
It’s worth it, for me, to know that I’m not going through so many plastic cleaning bottles that’ll end up floating in an ocean. We switched to Grove for dish soap, which you can get in a recyclable aluminum bottle at Target now. I live in a medium-sized city and while there are a couple bulk grocery options, there aren’t many for plastic-free toiletries or cleaning supplies…
That all being said, the calculus for sustainability is mind-boggling – I believe I read just recently that a cotton tote would have to be used something like 20,000 times to offset the resources used to make it.
Most sustainable of all is reusing/repurposing/thrifting, but that takes a lot of time and effort that those of us stuck in the capitalist grind don’t necessarily have. Ugh!