The Math Behind Our Metal Tube

Natural and environmentally responsible are supposed to go together. In a lot of the natural deodorant category, they do not. Walk down the natural deodorant aisle and you will find plant based formulas sitting inside the same plastic sticks as everything else, sometimes wrapped in a second layer of plastic on top of that. That struck us as backwards. If a product is gentle enough for skin, the packaging around it should not be working against that. We built BPM around a metal tube specifically to close that gap, and we wanted real numbers behind the claim, not just the word "sustainable" on a label.

We already explained the reasoning behind choosing metal over plastic or paperboard in our earlier article on packaging. This one is about what that choice actually weighs, measured against a leading plastic stick, Native.

We put a Native stick and the components of a BPM tube on a calibrated lab scale, the same one we use to weigh essential oils for our formulations, one unit each. See the photos below for the actual measurements, taken component by component on that scale.

Native's figure is every plastic part of the stick weighed as one reading, the stick body, its own cap, the internal elevator that pushes product up, and the fill stopper. 

Two things come out of that table. First, the only plastic BPM uses anywhere is the 0.69 gram cap. Set that against everything Native ships in, plastic end to end, at 38.39 grams, and BPM uses about 56 times less plastic. Second, even counting everything we ship in, tube, cap, and box together, our total packaging still comes to 18.47 grams against Native's 38.39. That is a reduction of 51.9 percent, more than half, and it accounts for every gram of packaging on both sides: Native ships with no box or other outer packaging, so 38.39 grams is their complete total, not a partial figure we are comparing against our full one.

We are not claiming zero plastic. The cap is plastic for a reason we would rather disclose than gloss over: we tried metal caps first, and they reacted with the minerals in our formula. A lined metal cap would have solved that, but we could not source one, so we went with a small plastic cap instead. It was not a cost decision, it was a chemistry limitation we have not solved yet. What we did eliminate is the part that made up nearly all of the plastic in the first place: the body of the container itself.

These numbers come from a single unit of each product, weighed on the same calibrated lab scale we use for our own formulation work, the same standard of disclosure we used for our cost per application numbers. We do not have a filmed record for this one, but the photos above show each component on the scale as we weighed it.

"We did not want to build a skin-friendly, natural deodorant product and then ship it in packaging that fought against the reason we built it," says Corey Goss, Founder and President of BPM Natural Deodorant. "Skin friendly and environmentally responsible have to go hand in hand, or neither one really means anything. We wanted less plastic, and right out of the gate, before we have any of the scale a brand like Native has, we already use about 56 times less of it. That is the kind of number we built this company to be able to show you."

If you are also curious what this costs per use, we broke that down separately in the math behind our pricing.