Keeping your hands and immediate surroundings clean is now more important than ever. However, we shall not forget about mother earth.

Even though it still might sound surreal to many, we are still in the midst of a pandemic. While necesssary measures such as wearing disposable medical products have been passed in order to stop the virus from spreading, many of these measures unavoidably have led to even more dispoable waste being produced as of late. Moreover, as we still lack full scientific clarity and empirical values (i.e. we are unsure about the degree of contamination of potentially infected surfaces), a significant amount of people wear disposable gloves for instance. Keeping our hands clean and disinfected remains one of the core tasks as part of our daily routine. More specifically, it is recommended that we wash our hands several times a day for a duration of at least 20 seconds while we should avoid touching the face, as this is one of the most likely ways of infection. In order to follow this broad recommendation, we face different options.

Hand wash or disinfectant?

Undoubtedly, among the most effective ways to be as safe as possible and reduce the risk of infection or spreading the virus is through continous and frequent hand washing. Many people however are using hand sanitiser, among the reasons is its ease of use. Importantly to stress at this point — clearly both disinfectants and soap can help protect yourself from coronavirus infection. If outside it can become difficult to wash your hands throughout the day, which is why hand sanitizer could be used to ensure that you are cleaning your hands as often as needed. From a medical point of view, there are indeed good reasons for the popularity of the disinfectant sprays and gels. They can also be infectious but can easily be removed from there with disinfectants. Provided that you use the right one — and know when it makes sense to use it. Recent research has shown that coronaviruses can adhere to surfaces for several days. For that reason, it is suggested that in order for the virus to be killed from your skin you need hand sanitizer with an alcohol content of at least 60%. To sum up, disinfectants make sense to be used in many parts of our daily life — especially across public facilities.

But what about washing your hand with hand soap? Does it do the job just as good or even better? Without diving to deep into the underlying science, it is important to understand that the coronaviruses’ lipid envelope is fat-soluble. This lipid envelope — that basically serves as as proteticion for the virus — is dissolved and destroyed by hand soap. Even if washing your hands seems banal, it is exactly the right means to reliably eliminate viruses since soap contains surfactants that react with the lipid shell of coronaviruses. Supported by water, the surfactant molecules compete with the lipid molecules and disrupt their connection to one another and to the skin on which the virus is sitting. Voila.

To conclude, the regular use of disinfectants is not absolutely necessary as long as we have access to soap. By using a true zero waste solution like aersoa developed by our team, it is hence possible to stay safe while eliminating single-use packaging and minimizing carbon emissions. All it takes is around 8 grams of powder, 380ml of water and our soap dispenser.

Move over bar soap

Liquid, pre-filled body care and especially soap grew in popularity in the 1960’s to become the dominant product in the market over solid products such as bar soaps. This can be largely attributed to the prevalence of cheap to manufacture disposable, single-use bottles and containers which emerged as part of a broad industrial revolution in the Western world. This — among other factors — continues to contribute to our global waste challenges. However, we experience a shift in people’s mindset, and we at aer want to take the lead in the field of home and personal care to change the way our society consumes and chooses its products. For our body care products this has resulted in a hand wash that arrives in powder form, turns into a brilliant liquid hand wash when you add water from the tap, and foams when you wash up with it.

Our solution does not only save space and resources, but ultimlately saves our planet. As people are becoming more environmentally conscious as we adapt to these times, we on our behalf will continue the constant search for more sustainable alternatives to existing home and personal care solutions. But what will the future look like? We may see new and even more environmentally friendly materials develop and new opportunities will evolve to increasingly use plant-based ingredients in solid form for a broad range of products. Important for us at aer is to have these innovations developed by our team in Austria while also keeping the manufacturing of the final products locally. It is the only way to continue being as independent as possible while ensuring that innovations are paired with the highest quality standards possible. For now and onwards, let’s stay safe with sustainable solutions.

Finally, an alternative that enables customers to eliminate single-use, disposable packaging has arrived. All our products are shipped in 100% biodegradable and compostable packaging material.

A mere look at the statistics is a shame: Around 14 billion pounds of our trash is dumped into the ocean each year. Roughly 28,000 thousand tons of single-use plastic is disposed of into the waters that make our planet so shiny and blue. What this misstate results in is also obvious and known. Eventually, these disposable packaging pieces, which land in different parts of our environment, not only the waters, will break down into tiny pieces that potentially form part of our future food and water supply. A truly vicious cycle we have to stand up and fight against — now and united as one.

Moreover, a fact that has reached less awareness is that conventional home and personal care products are made of 80–95% water. An ingredient that most people, especially in the developed world, have readily available at home. These vast amounts of water that are being shipped across the continent each day, in and out, over and over again, cause significant inefficiencies. First, water contained in each bottle and container takes up large amounts of space in containers, trucks and other carriers of transport. Second, it forms by far the largest contributor to the total weight of home and personal care products, thereby causing substantial amounts of carbon emissions that could easily be avoided. So why ship it then in the first place? Why not simply get rid of the water and have customers add it themselves in a second? That’s where we come into play. Are powders perform just as well as conventional, pre-filled and environmentally harming home and body care.

We are convinced that we can do better, which is why our whole team at aer is eager to tackle the deficiencies inherent in home and personal care, two industries which have been causing vast amounts of unnecessary waste and poluiton primarily as the result of poor product and process design. Most importantly, we want to do so without making compromises on product quality, design, affordability and especially convenience for our customers. After months and now years of experimenting, formulating, designing and testing our products, we created our first set of home and body care products, which are all shipped with the least packaging and the most convenience possible. Importantly, we have created a system of refills — that come for as little as €2 per piece — that literally causes zero waste for your ongoing supply for different parts of your daily routine.

Our refills are shipped to you in the smallest possible paper packaging, all of it being 100% biodegradable and compostable. This means that even in the worst-case scenario in which our product packaging is disposed of improperly and one of our paper sachets lands in a place other than a bin, it will simply disappear and self-composted into dirt after some time.

For more information on new product launches, offers and general updates on our brand make sure to follow along at @theaercare.

Crisp, clean and minimal personal and home care products made in Austria and shipped directly to your doorstep within the EU. That’s us in a nutshell.

Dear community,

Allow us to introduce ourselves. We’ve invested and sacrificed quite a bit over the past year or so in order to finally be here. We are a tiny, self-financed giant in the field of Home and Personal care, an ocean of noise and false promises.

Via this platform we strive to shine light on our brand, products and developments we are working on. We look forward to providing you insights into how we choose our ingredients, materials and many of the other matters we deal with on a daily basis. Importantly, we want our followers to know why we do things the way we do them, why we make the decisions we make and just how we are going to reinvent the bare essentials for your body and home.

It ain’t gonna be easy. But it will be transparent, sustainable and simple. We hope you’ll all join along with us.

Perfectionism and the strong conviction that our bodies and homes deserve better products is what drives us forward.

We have finally launched, with every member of our team playing multiple roles — formulating, making, planning, designing and executing. It all started in 2019 when we concluded our analyses of the deficiencies present in home and personal care, a steady state of poor product design we were forced to witness for too long. Based on the principle ‘less is more’, we have conceptualized aer.

Based in Vienna, Austria, we are striving to eliminate single-use packaging and set new standards in the formulation and product design of Home and Personal Care. From kitchen cleaner to scented hand soap, all our products come in reusable and recyclable containers.

Moreover, the solid-form formulations come in biodegradable paper packaging only, enabling refills to truly eliminate single-use containers. Customers can either order them once or sign-up for a recurring subscription, providing automatic supplies for the utmost convenience. While customers benefit from a yet unseen sustainable product experience, several inefficiencies inherent in home and personal care become obsolete simultaneously through our approach. Existing Home and Personal Care products often contain up to 80% of water, resulting in highly inefficient, environmentally harming and expensive supply chains. By providing sustainable formulations in solid, water-soluble form, our products completely eliminate this deficiency. With the addition of an aesthetically-pleasing design, we aim to push forward to provide a truly environment-friendly option for Home and Personal Care.

For more information on new product launches, offers and general updates on our brand make sure to follow us @theaercare.

Following the product revolution, we bring to you the packaging revolution with the first food to foil process in the field of personal care.

Since day 1, we have been keen to package our home and personal care products in a way that reduces any impact on the environment. For us, the streamlining and mere elimination of packaging form part of the quality of each of our products. That being said, it’s not always easy, but the conviction and passion for testing the limitations of science as part of our product innovations is what drives us forward and results in unique and superior experiences for you. Obviously, we do not possess the big R&D budgets of the giants we aim to outpace. However, with determination we continue to push the boundaries, looking for more ways we can incorporate sustainability into our daily lives without disrupting our busy schedules.

Now, we are one step closer to launching the biggest packaging innovation yet. What might look like a mere foil is so much more. This is the future of packaging for everything needed in your daily routine. This is the future of personal and home care.

While using 100% compostable and biodegradable cellulose sachets for our powders, we went one step further. We chose to package our soap bars in a material called SCOBY. This biomaterial is made through a biological process using local agricultural and food waste. It is 100% plastic free and 40 times stronger than paper. By using SCOBY to package our products, you can go about your day seamlessly, enjoying a healthy face and body cleansing routine, whilst patting yourself on the back for doing your bit in saving the world by reducing waste. You can even choose to eat the packaging, should you be unusually hungry in the shower! We won’t judge. Our advice though: do not eat the packaging, as soap does not rank among the tastiest things in life.

In addition to this milestone, we have developed three different bars to cater to the different needs of your face, body, and hair. Once again, as promised with all our products, they are handmade following an artisan approach here in the Western part of Austria while using 100% natural ingredients.

No harsh chemicals, all pure ingredients, responsibly sourced and manufactured.

Now, we take pleasure in introducing to you our three body care additions:

aerhar — hair soap bar

The formula for this hair wash is specially made to make your hair soft, healthy, and easy to comb, whilst moisturising your scalp. Coconut oil and almond oil are known to strengthen your hair, whilst olive oil replenishes the oils especially in dry and damaged hair. The shea butter moisturises the scalp and helps make your hair beautifully soft.

aersop — body soap bar

The simplicity of this product is its biggest asset. It is simply an olive oil based body wash enhanced with some essential oils. It is perfect for dry and sensitive skin. The natural properties of olive oil are great at deeply moisturising the skin, leaving it feeling smooth and healthy.

aervis — face soap bar

The bold appearance of this bar pairs well with our confidence in its properties. The activated charcoal in the soap and almond oil absorb excessive oils and impurities on the skin, whilst the shea butter moisturises, leaving the face feeling refreshed. The bar also mildly exfoliates, allowing the face wash to deeply cleanse your skin.

Why use a bar instead of a bottle?

The absence of water in a soap bar makes our product 90% lighter, reducing carbon emissions by an equal amount. In addition to this, when you use a bar, you rub the bar until the desired amount of lather is generated, which is generally less than how much a few pumps from a bottle provide. This allows the soap bar to last longer. Scientists from Zurich’s Institute of Environmental Engineering discovered that, based on consumer studies, a 30 second hand wash used .35g of bar soap, whilst a liquid soap wash used 2.3g, more than six times the amount (Kolloen, 2018). The stackable nature of the bar also means there is less wasted space when transporting the products to you and around the world, further reducing the carbon footprint of this product.

Our products are meant to be enjoyed by you, and are meant to bring us a step closer to reversing the damage done to our environment through excessive plastic usage. We will continue developing the formulations and packaging solutions that form the trigger for this progress to spoil your daily routine and home with zero waste products.

For more information on new product launches, offers and general updates on our brand make sure to follow along at @theaercare.

References

Kolloen, S. (2018) Why Bar Soap Is Better For The Environment Than Liquid Soap • Insteading.com Available at: https://insteading.com/blog/bar-soap-better-liquid-soap/ (Accessed: 23 January 2021).

image: SCOBY packaging is grown from agricultural waste and composts just like vegetables (2019). Available at: https://www.designboom.com/technology/makegrowlab-scoby-packaging-grow-and-compost-like-vegetables-06-06-2019/ (Accessed: 23 January 2021).