In April, Sustain Beauty Co partnered with Davines to challenge ten salons to give up laundry for a week to tell a story of both the freedom from the tyranny of laundry and the water savings. Those ten salons combined to save over 2,500 gallons of water and discovered a new type of drying experience. Each of the salons that partook had a different reason for wanting to experience the plant-based towels, from convenience to cost savings and, of course, to ease the impact on our planet.
My salon is very small and we send out our towels to have them washed and cleaned as we do not have a washer and dryer. This will not only save us from running out of towels, but also help us stop wasting towels by barely using them and helping the environment as well.
The salons shared their experience, the reason why they were doing the challenge, how their customers reacted and how this rocked their understanding of laundry as an assumptive staple of salon life.
This challenge made me conscious of how many towels we use on a daily basis, as well as water usage. I didn’t realize how much water it took to make our normal salon towels, and think it’s amazing Scrummi towels are made from wood. I’m taking a lot of these towels to a local composter!
Sustain Beauty Co donated 500 towels to each of the 10 salons and asked salons to share their honest feedback and perspectives. One lucky salon also won a laundry-cation as a reward for their exemplary showcase of just how mind-blowing Scrummi can be for a busy salon. For the Sharp and the Swann team, this challenge was a breath of fresh hair, freeing them from the hassle, time and cost of their typical 12 laundry loads they do a week.
We thoroughly enjoyed using Scrummi towels. We liked the efficiency of them, by not having to do laundry. They were very durable, even after using them when they are very wet. We did not like using them on our cart set up - we found that during dry haircuts, they collected a lot of little hairs and could not use the same cart towel throughout the day.
How did we calculate 2,500 gallons?
The first time most people hear of a single-use product, they assume it's bad for the planet. Yet, they never ask the same questions about the cotton towels they use, accepting that there is no alternative and the fact that its reusable makes it 'good.' That's old thinking, they quickly discover, as sustainability is about the entire sum of the impact and cotton frankly SUCKS. Cotton production is one of the worst crops, using hundreds of gallons of irrigated water to produce each towel, each crop doused with pesticides to protect crop fields. That said, we kept the math simple on this one challenge. Every towel uses roughly half a gallon each time it's washed. The ten salons used 5,000 towels as part of this challenge, which saved 2,500 gallons of water. That's not including the fact that most salons tend to use less towels when using Scrummi due to the lab tested superior absorbency and the fact that Scrummi towels use natural watershed rather than any irrigation. The true savings would be much higher, but we like to be modest.
Why does this matter
Progress is rarely easy and obvious. It takes dismantling systems to establish new and better ones, which means a bit of discomfort and disbelief along the way. Stay curious and see what you discover along the way.
We actually have our towels picked up/dropped off because we do not have a washer and dryer. Suprised by how many towels we can store in our cabinet, and how effective they are for cleaning up once they dry. The girls at the salon were hesitant at first, but they ended up liking them overall as well. Definitely made a difference for curly hair clients and the way their hair dried.
