The Matcha Initiative
Join us
I am the founder and soap crafter at My Naked Bar. I founded the label to spark conversations around living a more intentional low-waste lifestyle through playful applications of our soap packaging that challenges the norm. Prior to this journey, I was in the healthcare/eyecare industry.
Companies these days are increasingly looking to gift sustainably. However, a majority still view regular 'green' products as their choice sustainable gifts which lead to major over-production around the world (in relation to actual needs). Living in a first-world country, most Singaporean families have excessive amounts of such reusable items sitting unused at home, chucked into cabinets. Hence, I am on a journey to advocate for what I call Impact Positive Gifting - the gifting of essentials that are consumables that can be used up while inspiring low-waste lifestyles that recipients may not try out on their own.
I am happy to share my journey at My Naked Bar, the ethos that grounds us, and how we challenge the norms to start conversations and rally a community of contributors to broaden our impact.
I would also love to provide different perspectives on true sustainable gifting, how to be more critical in gift selection to avoid creating more waste while trying to support sustainability.
I've had a low-waste mindset from a young age and cannot part with items still in good condition, even packaging. A few years ago, when I read about how plastics take 500 years or more to break down, I was pulled into exploring the wider climate change issue which was, at the time, mostly discussed overseas. It was rarely talked about in Singapore, even in the media, and nobody around me cared. I wanted to help but lacked technical know-how to solve these issues, and my waste-reducing initiatives at home seemed too small.
I recognised that to have a bigger impact, more people need to join the journey. However, demonstrating waste reduction by producing only one jar of waste each year (or other extreme measures) only put the general public off. I felt we needed a non-judgmental, non-preaching approach to ease sustainability into Singaporeans' daily lives.
And that's how I started My Naked Bar, my own label of handcrafted vegan soap bars. I started it not just to introduce bar soaps as a zero-waste and low-carbon alternative to shower gel in single-use plastic bottles, but also to stop busy Singaporeans in their tracks with our upcycled milk carton packaging and get them to listen to my story. To make this initiative workable and broaden my impact, I rallied individuals and families around Singapore to contribute milk cartons from home so that we can ripple out a stronger message together.
Here are the actions I have implemented:
1. Rallying individuals and communities around Singapore to contribute used milk cartons. By doing so, we broaden the reach of our message and create greater awareness around the correct ways of recycling and the real efforts behind it.
2. Upcycling these milk cartons into primary, secondary and shipping packaging for our soap bars. We aim to start conversations around waste and climate issues, and inspire Singaporeans to lead a low-waste lifestyle.
3. Passing on excess milk carton caps to other organisations who can use them, such as Plastify, Playeum, 450.sg, The Sustainability Project, individual educators and more.
4. Gathering plastic backing from stickers and mailer bags, and passing them on to Green Nudge for use in their social project for low functioning IDs to build eco bricks.
5. Sharing our low-waste lifestyles through social media.
Finding enough milk cartons for our packaging was a challenge. To overcome it, we reached out to Package Pals, the community in Journey to Zero Waste, as well as people we met at pop-up events to rally for more packaging.
In the beginning, we were receiving poorly-washed milk cartons which ended up being discarded, prompting us to create content teaching the community how to properly clean cartons for reuse. With each collection, we provide the contributors feedback on areas for improvement, so that their efforts will not be wasted.
Initially, I was spending too much time and carbon on carton collection as a solopreneur. To minimise the impact of our initiative, I requested contributors to batch the cartons to 20 before they bring the cartons to me or I collect them. Besides my pop up events, we now have 3 carton drop-off points – our soap studio, The Green Collective and Unpackt.
I am proud of our little 'Ripple Tribe' - the community of contributors we've built up over the years, and how some organisations have accepted impact positive gifting, even using milk cartons, and presented to C-Suites on stage.