Zero Co, a sustainable-packaging personal care and home-cleaning products manufacturer in Australia, announced Tuesday that it managed to raise AU$ 2 million in a seed funding round under Skip Capital. The private investment company was established by Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar and veteran investment expert Kim Jackson.
Many other investors, including Cornish Family Investments’ Alex Cornish, Koala big bosses Danny Milham and Mitch Taylor, and former St George Bank chief executive Rob Chapman, also joined the round.
The company stated that it would utilize the new funds to develop new products, fill up senior management employees, put money in pouch cleaning and sanitation initiatives, conduct more large scale ocean cleanup drives, and look into international market expansions.
Zero Co creates laundry and cleaning products and packs it in recyclable containers, using the plastic waste gathered from landfills and the ocean. The company aims to help lessen single-use plastic in the country by delivering durable recycled bottles that customers can re-use. When the contents of these products are all used up, the customers can send it back to the company where it will be cleaned and re-filled to head back to the market.
In a statement, Zero Co co-founder Mike Smith said that if the company can encourage 20,000 households in Australia to avoid using single-use plastic and switch to their sustainable containers, the country can prevent as many as one million single-use plastic bottles from reaching the oceans and landfills for the coming year.
The company gathered the first batch of plastic waste products in Jakarta, Indonesia, back in December 2019. These items will be recycled into dispensers for household cleaning products and laundry detergents. According to Smith, they could pull over as many as 6,000 kilograms of plastic from the Java Sea.
He also said that the customers who will buy their products would know which part of the ocean that plastic came from since each Zero Co dispenser is printed with a tracking code.
Aside from the packaging, the company also mentioned that all its products are sustainable and earth-friendly. They only used ingredients that are plant-based, cruelty-free, vegan, and grey-water safe. The company also said that they do not create products that contain palm oil, which means that they are not producing any dishwasher tablets.
When talking about the deal, Jackson said that Skip Capital is excited to support Zero Co. Her company believes that the sustainable packaging brand already created a huge impact on using single-use plastics in the market. She also lauded that Zero Co came up with an outstanding product line that is completely waste-free.
Jackson also said that Smith and his dedicated staff are on a serious mission of beating the War on Waste. She and her investment firm are excited that more people will get their hands on these eco-friendly products.
Also, Jackson acknowledged that waste is a major problem globally. It is why her company is excited to put their money in entities like Zero Co, which are becoming industry leaders in waste elimination and revolutionizing the customer’s expectations about a product.
