Introducing: Rustic Strength, our new dish and hand soap supplier, now laundry liquid too

We’re switching to Rustic Strength for our dish soap and hand soap! And as of March 2023, for our laundry liquid too. Puracy was purchased by a larger company and discontinued their bulk program. Fortunately, we’re already thrilled with Rustic Strength and are happy to add to our RS lineup. Here are the Rustic Strength products we have so far:

dish soap: lemongrass or unscented | $0.25/oz

hand soap: lavender rosemary or citrus | $0.28/oz

laundry liquid: lavender or unscented | $0.36/oz

If that’s all you want to know, fab! If you’re interested in more detail on the switch and Rustic Strength, read on. 

Why the switch?

• RS offers their products in 30 gallon/250 lbs drums which fit in the shop. Puracy only offered 55 gallon/500 lbs drums which required us to store them at a warehouse offsite and shuttle soap back and forth to the shop every couple weeks. It was very hard to find 100 sq ft of warehouse space nearish to the shop, with a floor that could support 2,000 lbs of soap, and folks who would let us hang — our drums were in three different spaces in under a year! The smaller drums allow us to streamline operations and reduce emissions from driving. Huge yays! (If you ever want to be regaled with stories from the 55 gal drum days, just ask!)

• Rustic Strength (RS) is focused on supporting refill shops whereas the majority of Puracy’s business is still focused on single-use plastic. By directing a good amount of our shop dollars to RS with these most popular products, we’re supporting their growth and proving the financial viability of the bulk refill model to other suppliers. Update 3/2023: Puracy was purchased by a larger company even more focused on e-commerce and discontinued their bulk program altogether. Eff those guys! RS forever!!

• RS has much shorter lead times which helps us keep these highly sought-after products available for you. Since Puracy was still focused on their retail-size products, they prioritized those in manufacturing and have a 6-8 week lead time for the drums. This meant we were powerless to adjust if we had an uptick in sales while we were waiting on our latest order. 

• RS has a Close The Loop program where they take back all their containers larger than a gallon so we’ll be sending the drums back for refill. Puracy also took their drums back for refill so it was critical that any new supplier do the same.

• In addition to being focused on refill shops, RS meets all our usual requirements for new suppliers — a company that is situated in and accountable to its community, treats their people well, does due diligence on their ingredients, and makes effective products.

Is there a price difference?

The main downside of the switch is the price. Because Rustic Strength is not operating at the scale of Puracy, their products are not quite as affordable. In an effort to keep refilling as accessible as possible, we’re going to hold hand soap at $0.24/oz and only increase dish soap from $0.15/oz to $0.20/oz. Cleenland will also be making less money per oz with these prices but we still think our pricing philosophy is right: if refilling is affordable, more folks will do it and we’ll be as financially sustainable (if not more!) as if we priced everything higher and fewer folks were able to shop with us. It’s always scary to make a change but we think the tradeoff is worth it for the reasons described. 

Price update 5/1/23: Rustic Strength had to raise their prices due to ingredient price increases thus we’ve had to also.

What about the laundry? Isn’t it less concentrated?

The Rustic Strength laundry is sliiightly less concentrated than the Puracy so we’re recommending 1/2 - 1 TBSP for HE machines or 1-2 TBSP for regular machines, just depending on load size and soil level. This is still way more concentrated than other laundry liquids out there and with safer ingredients, in better packaging, from a great company. Plus the price is less per oz than the Puracy so it should even out cost-wise even with some larger loads in the mix.

How are the ingredients?

We do the research so you don’t have to! Rustic Strength uses one surfactant/emulsifier (polysorbate-20) and one preservative (methylisothiazolinone) that raised flags for us initially. We researched thoroughly and now feel great about carrying their products. Here’re the deets: 

• Polysorbate-20 

  • What is it? It’s a surfactant/emulsifier in both the dish and hand soap.

  • What’s the concern? It is really only a concern because the process of making polysorbate-20 can create a carcinogenic byproduct called dioxane that can contaminate the preservative. We asked Rustic Strength to provide a Safety Data Sheet (SDS) for the batch and it showed the dioxane content at 0, meaning they test for this contaminant and ensure it’s not present.

  • FUN FACT: NY State just passed a law this year limiting dioxane in personal and home care products because the big guys’s laundry detergent contains it off the charts! Not ours, baby!!

• Methylisothiazolinone 

  • What is it? It’s a preservative in the RS dish soap. Preservatives are critically important to all liquid soaps because, without them, dangerous bacteria and other microbes can grow. The water in liquid soaps is the ultimate host for these dudes which is why we try to carry as many products in bar and powder form as possible: less water, fewer preservatives. The thing with preservatives is they are inherently hostile to living things — that’s their whole purpose. So finding preservatives that are effective in preventing microbial growth but don’t damage other living systems is tricky. There is also a dearth of not-industry-influenced, peer-reviewed studies about the impact to human and ecosystem health of various preservatives so it’s honestly just hard to know which are better or worse. 

  • What’s the concern? Methylisothiazolinone initially gave us pause because we’ve read it can cause skin irritation. When we dug in deeper, we found the EU banned it only for leave-on applications (e.g. lotion, makeup, etc.) and limited the allowable amount for use in non-leave on applications (e.g. dish or hand soap.) To us, this indicates it’s safe to use in the limited concentration of the RS dish soap, otherwise the EU could have banned it in that context as well. We also checked with our local ingredient expert at Global Balance and confirmed, in his experience, methylisothiazolinone in limited concentrations is one of the better options available at the moment for preservatives. 

Let us know if you have any other questions about the switch! Thanks as always for your support and for using our planetary resources wisely :)