How Happy Human is saving the ocean one step at a time

Avid scuba divers and husband-and-wife duo Vinnie and Tima Ong are on a mission to save the ocean from plastic pollution with their range of refillable cleaning products called Happy Human.Inside FMCG chatted with Vinnie about the challenges of launching a business, working with Plastic Bank and how Australia still lacks the technology to become fully sustainable.Inside FMCG: How did your love for scuba diving lead you to launching Happy Human?Vinnie Ong: My husband Tima and I have been scuba divers for more than a decade – over the years, we’ve noticed our favourite diving sites turn from beautiful paradises to plastic dumping grounds. Scientists actually predict that there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050, and we were sadly watching this slowly but surely it is becoming our reality.  From then on, I was really motivated to make a change and rethink how I was personally using plastic. I started cutting down on my own single-use plastic consumption but I found it really difficult to find plastic-free alternatives without compromising on accessibility, affordability and effectiveness. This led me to doing my own research on better alternatives. We worked with scientists and designers to eventually create Happy Human, a refillable ‘just add water’ product that is not only affordable, but easy to use and good for the planet.While scuba diving, Vinnie Ong and her husband saw an opportunity on how to help save the ocean.Inside FMCG: Where did you get the idea of creating a tablet multi-purpose cleaner and hand wash?VO: I got the idea when I learnt that over 80 per cent of household cleaning products are water. Most supermarket brands are using so much extra single-use plastic to package something that we all have it on tap at home, not to mention the amount of carbon emissions produced to transport it. Seeing how common concentrated formulas like dishwashing tablets and Berocca are, my partner Tima and I thought we could apply this concept to all other consumer products and cut out the single-use plastics. At the height of Covid-19, when a lot of places were banning alternatives like reusable cups, we thought this was a fantastic solution to help reduce single-use plastic in the comfort of your own home. With this in mind, we surveyed households and discovered that people really loved the idea of ‘just add water’ concentrated formulas. So it was a no brainer from an environmental, accessibility and budget-friendly perspective to create our cleaning tabs.Inside FMCG: Your company is funding ocean clean up programs. How is Happy Human doing this with social enterprise, Plastic Bank?VO: We partnered with Plastic Bank because we were naturally aligned with their mission to stop plastics that end up in our oceans. For every bundle sold, we donate 1 per cent of profit to help Plastic Bank reprocess single-use plastics pulled from the oceans and redirected from landfill into the global supply chain as Social Plastic [which are the recovered materials from Plastic Bank.]Since February this year, our Happy Human community has helped Plastic Bank prevent 50,3000 plastic bottles from entering the oceans!Inside FMCG: Ten years from now, how do you want your company to create an impact in the environment?VO: The north star for Happy Human is to help make sustainable choices accessible to everyone and help stop millions of single-use plastics ending up in oceans and landfill. We have a lot of work to do before we think about 10 years on, and our first milestone is for 10,000 Aussies to join us in cutting down on household plastics by swapping to refill options, which ultimately helps 500,000 single-use plastics from being thrown away. Vinnie Ong says Australia needs to do more to become fully sustainable.Inside FMCG: How do you convince consumers to switch to using sustainable products?VO: The majority of people have good intentions when it comes to reusing and recycling. However, many alternatives on the market today are either expensive or aren’t easily accessible, so you can’t blame people for reaching for single-use cleaning products in the supermarket aisle. So to put it simply, the key to convincing consumers to switch to using sustainable products is making it accessible! By making sustainable products accessible and inexpensive for consumers, they will naturally want to make the better choice for their home and planet. This is what Happy Human aims to solve, and break the stereotype that trying to be sustainable equals expensive or inconvenient through our refillable products.Inside FMCG: You said that Australia is still lacking the technology to recycle materials. What do you think companies should do to address this?VO: Shockingly, only around 9 per cent of all plastic waste ever produced has been recycled, 12 per cent incinerated and the rest accumulates in landfills or the ocean. With this in mind, companies need to rethink their processes and look at ways they can reduce their own waste. This could mean reassessing their product packaging, opting for a refill model, using reusable products, composting facilities or limiting the amount of packaging used to transport goods – every little effort counts. At Happy Human, we thought about everything even down to the end of life of our packaging and products. We use 100 per cent compostable packaging for our refill tabs, compostable materials go one step further than biodegradable by providing the earth with nutrients once the material has completely broken down. Composting is a great example of a ‘closed loop’ system because there is absolutely no waste at the end of the process.