EcoStick - Truly the greenest solution for hotel single serve packaging

Published on Jun 5, 2019

How does the James Cook Chancellor, one of Wellington’s premium hotels, remove 90,000 plastic bottles a year from its environmental footprint?

By introducing HealthPak’s new EcoStick packaging.

EcoStick is a unique, premium paper based packaging alternative to the traditional single use plastic bottles and tubes used by hotels and motels around the world for their shampoo and conditioner.  Only around 5% of the packaging weight of a plastic bottle, EcoStick is a state of the art paper based solution that can effectively hold and dispense hair and body care products for hotel guest use. 

The critical difference between EcoStick and other packaging is that it has been specifically designed to go into landfill, breaking down in under ten years. Other packaging claims to be biodegradable, but relies on light & oxygen for the process to happen, meaning once it’s in landfill it won’t biodegrade, as there is no oxygen or light below that depth.

“The reality is, that wet, empty EcoStick from the floor of the shower is going to end up nowhere but landfill,” says Jimi Kennedy-Grant, HealthPak’s General Manager of Sales and Marketing. “So from the get go, we designed the product to break down in the only place it was going to end up.”

Kennedy-Grant says New Zealand accommodation providers use an estimated 76 million bottles of shampoo, conditioner and bath gel a year, and although most of these will be packaged in recyclable bottles, almost all will go straight to landfill due to the fact it is uneconomical to recycle them or they are just too small to be sorted in our current recycling systems. EcoStick offers a viable alternative and could revolutionise the global accommodation industry and have a massive, positive impact on landfill waste.

“All the common products promoted as green do not break down in landfill,” Kennedy-Grant says. “Landfill is anaerobic, there is no oxygen. Therefore the compostability of those products is nil. That’s the irony - litter to your heart’s content out the car window, and they will break down. Put them in landfill, and they don’t. None of your oxo-degradables will break down at all.”

The James Cook Hotel Grand Chancellor has a ‘green team’ of passionate staff, who are always looking for new initiatives to reduce the hotel’s environmental footprint, such as sustainable packaging. Produced in HealthPak’s Forest and Bird range, the shift to EcoStick aligns with the hotel’s ethos, and its brand position.

“Forest and Bird has been part of the Club Floor guest experience for a number of years. The James Cook Hotel Grand Chancellor team are excited to present the sustainable amenities throughout the entire hotel in 2019, including the EcoSticks in the standard and refurbished rooms,” said Steve Martin, Hotel General Manager.

EcoStick is the result of more than five years of research and development, and over half a million dollars in direct investment. HealthPak spent five years just working with machine and paper manufacturers to create the material, and nowhere else in the world has anything like it.

Look out for it soon in a hotel near you!