A post-graduate student from London’s Central Saint Martins University has developed shampoo and other personal hygiene product packaging made entirely of soap.

Using vegetable-based soap and dye from the pigments of minerals, flowers and plants, Mi Zhou developed a line of toiletry bottles called Soapack. Once the vegetable-based soap is combined with the dye, the mixture is molded into vessels that resemble perfume bottles. Outer bottle layers are sealed with beeswax to prevent leaking. Once the products inside the Soapacks are depleted, the bottles can be re-used if kept dry, or used as a traditional bar of soap, disintegrating with exposure to water. Once the bottle dissolves, nothing is left behind. The eco-friendly and waste-free bottles come with a paper-like label listing instructions for use.

"Product packaging has always been thrown away, no matter how well-designed or what material it is made of," said Zhou. "I want to re-evaluate what packaging could be as well as help us to reduce our plastic footprint."

Because conventional plastic, like the kind used for shampoo bottles and other personal hygiene products, can take as much as 450 years to break down, Zhou and a host of other innovators are attempting to find solutions for how everyday products are packaged, keeping plastic from landfills and from overwhelming the world’s oceans.

A few other recent examples include a startup that is selling cleaning solution in tablet form to avoid the use of plastic packaging, and a Mexico-based startup that is turning avocado pits into biodegradable straws, cutlery and other single-use items. Likewise, a research team from the University of Canterbury in New Zealand devised a new technique for turning food waste into chemical components that could potentially be used as the building blocks for bioplastics.