Jeremy Lee was shocked when he discovered that most cleaning products were anything but clean for the environment.

“I was surprised to learn how most home cleaning products are formulated and sold in a way that is unsustainable, expensive and inefficient. Most of the time consumers are just paying to transport water!” Lee said of the many products on the market that are packaged in single-use plastic bottles and comprise of over 96% water.

Lee felt compelled to rethink the traditional way of manufacturing home cleaning products and wanted to create products that would not only be effective but also environmentally friendly and sustainable. He came up with the idea to provide only the active ingredients in a dehydrated tablet form. Consumers could then easily make their own cleaning solution by dissolving the tablets in bottles or other containers they already had at home, eliminating the need for single-use plastic bottles and reducing transportation costs of heavy liquids. Thus, SimplyGood was born.

Lee and his team got to work in creating SimplyGood’s proprietary tablets. “Most cleaning solutions available on the market today come in a liquid form, so the industry was not well set up to produce a dry tablet. In the early days, many manufacturers and research laboratories we contacted did not have the right equipment to produce our formulas,” Lee explained.

His team finally came up with the right formulation after hundreds of test trials. The resulting tablet is 300 times lighter and 200 times smaller than traditional cleaning solutions. Aside from being effective on a variety of surfaces, it is also natural, plant-based and comes in earth-friendly packaging. The fact that the tablets are refillable also creates a circular model that’s good for consumers’ pockets and also for the planet.

Lee is not alone in recognizing the environmental impact of our everyday habits and actions. Across Southeast Asia, 91% of consumers said they were extremely concerned about plastic waste issues. In Singapore alone, more than 980,000 metric tons of plastic waste was generated in 2021, of which only 6% was recycled, according to the National Environment Agency.

To raise awareness and reach more like-minded consumers, SimplyGood set up its flagship store on Lazada to sell its products and also worked with the eCommerce giant’s Intellectual Property Rights Protection team to safeguard its original product formulations. The company’s story of innovating for good was recently featured in the inaugural World Intellectual Property Day Youth Video Competition, where it was selected as one of the top 20 finalists from more than 140 global entries.

“The excessive use of plastic poses a serious global climate threat, especially following the recent surge in demand and consumption during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Lee said. “At SimplyGood, we’re passionate about helping consumers take easy actions at home, which have a real and positive impact on the planet. Your actions, no matter how big or small, can go a long way in protecting the world we live in.”