Seventh Generation Zero Plastic Home Cleaning Line Review 2020 | Zero Waste Cleaning Products
The Top Line:
NOT a buy. The Seventh Generation Zero Complete Bundle for home cleaning includes the hand washing powder, toilet bowl cleaner powder, laundry tablets, dishwasher tablets, kitchen cleaner powder and bathroom cleaner powder. For a lower price, the whole home bundle omits the hand washing powder, which we like.
The ingredients are non-toxic and the canisters are made of steel — the world’s most recycblable material. However, as an example, with dishwasher powder, we prefer Seventh Gen’s old school powder in a cardboard box, which is already pretty zero waste.
While we like most of the items in the bundles, the whole set is just too expensive overall, even with the discount. We look forward to the Seventh Generation refills that lower the price even more.
The Good Things (the reasons the bundle makes sense):
✔ Pretty nice discount on the products with the bundle. Even at the raised prices, the bundle is still a 20% discount.
✔ No thinking! If you want a full intro to zero waste products by a big name brand who does it (mostly) right, then this is a quick way to shift your products.
✔ Zero Plastic Toilet Bowl Cleaner Powder (Our Review Here)
✔ Zero Plastic Powdered Hand Soap (Our review)
✔ Zero Plastic Kitchen Powder Cleaner (Our review)
The Bad Things (the reasons to skip the bundle):
✗ We are not sure about the pricing yet, since it jumped quite a bit from our first purchase.
✗ Zero Plastic Laundry Tablets (Our review here)
✗ Zero Plastic Bathroom Cleaner Powder (Our review)
✗ Zero Plastic Dishwasher Tablets (Our review)
The Breakdown:
Cost & Products: $64.75 for a set of 6: laundry tablets, hand washing powder, dishwasher tablets, kitchen cleaner powder, bathroom cleaner powder, and toilet cleaner powder.
Note: Grove Collaborative has increased the price since introducing the line a few weeks ago. Originally, the Seventh Generation Zero Plastic line only had the option of all 6 items for $46.95.
The new options are the complete bundle of 6 for $64.75 and the whole home bundle line of 5 for $41.75 (19% off)
Packaging: Packacking was zero — the tins cae as they were in the box. We have mentioned previously in other reviews that the tins came bent and dinged up (with no product loss). We flagged this issue with Grove Collaborative as an FYI and they gav us a full credit back, which was unexpected.
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, which is $19.99 per year.
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 environmentally friendly products in every way possible.
The Details
Almost all off the product worked really well — except for the laundry tablet that didn’t dissolve in a smaller, delicate load.
The entire line is non-toxic, which is standard with Seventh Generation products.
Many items contain limited ingredients or otherwise are made of plant- or minerally-derived components.
No products are made from animals and there is no animal testing.
Zero plastic, the items are housed in steel canisters, which is the world’s most recycled material and most recyclable material.
The canisters, however, are not different colors or sizes, which makes storing easy but unfortunately, not quickly identifiable. We wish they were at least different colors
We also wish they were a different color or theme: right now, they look a little like the Comet bleach-based cleaner from back in the day.
Half of the canisters were really difficult to open (right hand side in the main photo: toilet bowl cleaner, hand wash powder, and kitchen cleaner, ironically our 3 favorite items!). We think this is largely to do with Seventh Generation’s Zero Plastic line being really new. We are treating it as a PSA right now.
Money Report
The biggest drawback to any of the products is not quality — it is cost. The line is on the expensive side and we look forward to the prices cheapening up with refills. Also, tablet-based products are just going to be more expensive than Seventh Generation’s existing powdered line that is in paper boxes, like their dishwasher detergent power.
Our three BUY recommendations (zero plastic hand soap, toilet cleaner powder, and kitchen cleaner) also happen to be the cheaper among the competition. In the case of the toilet bowl cleaner, we love the combination of non-toxic and zero waste, which we struggle to find. Plus, we think that the canister can last even longer than we calculated.
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!
