How to Reduce Single Use Plastic Cleaning Waste Under the Kitchen Sink

To reduce single use plastic cleaning waste, start under the kitchen sink: pull everything out, count the bottles, then replace the overlapping all purpose, glass, bathroom and floor sprays with one refillable concentrate. That single change collapses a cupboard full of half used plastic into a few bottles you keep refilling.

Why the under sink cupboard is the right place to start

Almost every Australian home has the same hidden mess in the same spot: the cupboard under the kitchen sink. It is where cleaning bottles go to multiply. A surface spray here, a glass cleaner there, a bathroom foam someone bought on special, a floor liquid bought for one job and never finished, plus a few trigger sprays that no longer pump. Most of it is plastic, most of it is single use, and a surprising amount is half empty and forgotten.

I run a cleaning business, and I open these cupboards in other people's homes most weeks. The pattern barely changes from house to house. People are not careless or wasteful on purpose. They buy a product for one stubborn job, it does that job, and then it sits there taking up room while the next problem gets its own new bottle. Over a couple of years that quietly becomes a wall of plastic nobody chose deliberately. Seeing the same thing in dozens of kitchens is a big part of why HomeKind exists.

This page is deliberately narrow. It is not about the broad refill habit across the whole house, and it is not about every room. It is about one cupboard and the specific change you can make there in an afternoon. That focus matters, because under sink clutter is where plastic waste is most visible and most fixable. You can pull everything out, line it up on the bench, and see the problem with your own eyes. That is a far better starting point than a vague plan to use less plastic someday. If you want the wider picture first, our pillar guide on eco cleaning and cutting plastic waste at home sets the context. This article is the hands on, one cupboard version.

What is actually under there: the audit

Before you change anything, do a quick audit. This step matters because the goal is not to throw out usable product, it is to stop the cycle that keeps refilling the cupboard with new plastic. You cannot cut what you have not counted, and almost nobody knows their real number until they line it up.

The five minute pull out

1. Empty the cupboard. Take out everything, including the lonely sponges, the spare cloths and the bag stuffed with other bags.
2. Group by job. Sort into all purpose, glass and mirror, bathroom and shower, floors, dishwashing, and specialty (oven, drain, stainless steel, and so on).
3. Count the plastic. Tally the bottles in each group and write the number down. Most people are genuinely surprised by the total.
4. Check the levels. Mark each bottle as empty, nearly empty, half full, or barely touched. The half used ones tell the real story.
5. Note the duplicates. Two glass cleaners. Three all purpose sprays. The repetition is the whole point.

What you usually find is overlap, not need. Four or five different products that each do one job, when in reality most everyday cleaning is the same job done on different surfaces. That overlap is the plastic you can cut, because every one of those bottles was made, filled, shipped, used briefly, and headed for landfill or the kerbside bin.

A typical Australian under sink count

The table below reflects the kind of spread commonly found in a family kitchen cupboard. It is illustrative, not a statistic: your numbers will differ, but the shape rarely does. The right hand column is the honest part, because it shows how few products a routine actually requires.

For routine cleaning, most of those distinct jobs collapse into one or two products. The rest is duplication and single use plastic bought out of habit, not necessity.

The core idea: consolidate the jobs, then keep the bottles

There are two separate wins under the sink, and people often confuse them. The first is consolidation: doing more jobs with fewer products. The second is reuse: stopping the cycle of buying a fresh plastic bottle every time one runs out. You want both, and they reinforce each other. Consolidation shrinks how many products you own. Reuse shrinks how many you keep buying.

Consolidation works because the surfaces in a kitchen and bathroom are not as different as the marketing suggests. A benchtop, a tile, a sealed stone island, a glass splashback, a stainless steel oven door and a sealed timber floor can all be cleaned with the same well made plant based cleaner, just at different strengths. The trick is dilution. A heavy job gets a stronger mix, a light wipe down gets a gentler one, floors get a bucket dose. One product, several strengths, sorted by how much water you add.

This is exactly where a concentrate earns its place. HomeKind All in One Cleaner Concentrate is built to replace your all purpose, glass, bathroom and floor cleaners with a single 1L bottle. You dilute roughly 5 to 10ml per litre of water for everyday spraying, 10 to 20ml per litre for heavier grime, and 20 to 30ml per bucket for floors. It is enzyme activated, with a blend of protease, amylase and lipase that targets protein, starch and grease residues rather than just smearing them around, and it dries clear on glass and mirrors. That last point quietly removes the most common excuse for keeping a separate glass cleaner under the sink.

A quick dilution cheat sheet by surface

If you only remember one thing, remember that strength follows the mess. Here is the rough mapping most kitchens and bathrooms need.

You do not need a laboratory about it. Measure 10ml into a standard spray bottle for everyday strength, and you adjust up for tougher jobs. Mix a little stronger if a surface still feels filmy, a little weaker if it does not need it.

The glass cleaner is the bottle most people forget to cut

When people consolidate, they usually remember the all purpose sprays and forget the glass cleaner, because glass feels special. It is not. The only real job a dedicated glass product does is dry without leaving a film, and a cleaner formulated to do that does the same on a mirror, a splashback and a window. Cutting that one product removes a whole bottle from your kerbside bin and one more trigger spray from the cupboard. In client homes it is reliably the bottle people are most surprised to lose, because they were sure glass needed its own thing. For the technique side of that swap, see our guide on how to clean glass and mirrors so they dry clear.

Step by step: the under sink reset

Set aside about an hour. This is a one off job that pays back every shopping trip afterwards.

1. Audit and group. Do the pull out described above. Lay everything out and see the overlap with your own eyes.
2. Use up, do not bin. Throwing out half full bottles just moves plastic to landfill faster. Finish what is usable. Set the duplicates aside to use first.
3. Choose your keepers. Pick the durable bottles you will reuse: one or two good trigger sprays and a sturdy bottle for floor mix. Glass is sturdiest, but a thick walled plastic trigger that already works is fine to keep going.
4. Clean and label. Rinse your keepers and label each one clearly with the dilution and the surface. Masking tape and a marker is plenty.
5. Switch to a concentrate. Replace the cycle of single use bottles with one concentrate you dilute as needed. This is where the plastic reduction actually compounds over the year.
6. Recycle the rest properly. Empty, rinse and dry the bottles you are retiring, remove the trigger heads, and put the clean bottles in kerbside recycling. More detail on heads and lids below.
7. Reset the cupboard. Put back only what you use weekly. The cupboard should look almost empty. That space is the visible proof the reset worked.

What actually gets recycled, and what does not

Here is the part most plastic guides skip, and it is the part that decides whether your old bottles get a second life or just go to landfill from a different bin. Wishful recycling, tossing things in the kerbside bin hoping they qualify, often does more harm than good, because contaminated loads get rejected.

• The bottle body is usually fine for kerbside recycling once it is empty, rinsed and dry. Wet residue and leftover product can contaminate a load, so a quick rinse genuinely matters.
• Trigger spray heads are the catch. They combine plastic, a metal spring and sometimes a small ball, and these mixed material parts are generally not accepted in kerbside recycling. Pull the trigger head off and either keep it to reuse on a bottle you are refilling, or put it in general waste. Do not leave it on a bottle you are recycling.
• Lids and small caps are often too small to be sorted by kerbside machinery and can be rejected. Check your own council's guidance, since rules vary across Australian councils, and when in doubt keep lids for reuse.
• Soft plastics such as refill pouches and film wrap are a separate problem. Australia's main supermarket soft plastic collection scheme stopped operating, so soft plastics mostly are not kerbside recyclable right now. That is a strong reason to favour a rigid bottle you refill over a stream of soft pouches you cannot easily recycle.

The simplest rule: refill the durable bottle you already own as many times as it lasts, and only recycle it, cleaned and head removed, once it genuinely wears out. A bottle reused fifty times is worth far more than a bottle recycled once.

The plastic maths, with a real example

It is worth being concrete rather than hand wavy here. Picture a household that gets through one 750ml ready to use trigger spray every three weeks across kitchen and bathroom. That is roughly seventeen or eighteen plastic bottles bought and binned in a year, just for general spraying, before you count glass cleaner, bathroom spray and floor liquid on top.

Now swap that for one 1L concentrate. At everyday dilution, a single 1L bottle makes a large run of spray bottles worth of cleaner, on the order of dozens, which comfortably covers a typical year of general cleaning from one container that you refill into the same durable trigger again and again. Instead of a tall stack of empty triggers heading to the bin, you finish the year with one concentrate bottle to recycle and the durable spray bottles still in service. You are not eliminating plastic entirely (the concentrate bottle is recyclable plastic, not glass, and we will not pretend otherwise), but you are collapsing many bottles into a small number, which is the honest shape of the saving.

On cost, the same logic holds as a derived range, not a promise. Diluting one 1L concentrate down to everyday strength works out to somewhere around 40 cents per refilled spray bottle, compared with the rough five to seven dollars a ready to use supermarket spray typically costs off the shelf. The exact figure depends on how strong you mix and how much you use, so treat it as a direction rather than a guaranteed number: fewer bottles bought, less plastic in the bin, and a cheaper cupboard. For the wider habit side of this, our guide on refilling and reusing for low waste cleaning goes deeper.

What to keep, what to retire

Not everything under the sink should go. Consolidation is about cutting overlap, not stripping your home of every useful tool. Here is an honest split.

Worth keeping

• One or two durable trigger spray bottles you can refill indefinitely.
• A sturdy bottle or measuring jug for floor and bucket mixing.
• Microfibre cloths, which cut how much product you need in the first place.
• Any genuine specialty product for a job a general cleaner cannot do, such as a dishwasher product or a drain treatment.

Usually safe to retire

• Duplicate all purpose sprays.
• A dedicated glass cleaner, once your everyday cleaner dries clear.
• A separate bathroom spray for routine wipe downs.
• A single use floor liquid that a concentrate can replace at bucket dilution.
• Trigger sprays that no longer pump, after you salvage any working heads.

Septic, greywater and the drain under that sink

There is a practical angle people overlook when they declutter under the kitchen sink: whatever you pour down that drain matters, especially on a septic system or where greywater is reused in the garden. Cutting the number of products is good, but the one you keep should also be kind to what is downstream. A septic tank relies on living bacteria to break down waste, and harsh cleaners in volume can knock that balance about. Greywater that waters a vegetable patch should not be carrying phosphates or heavy synthetic loads onto the soil.

HomeKind is greywater and septic safe, plant based, with no phosphates, no synthetic dyes, no parabens and no SLS, which suits homes on tank water, septic, or anyone watering the garden with laundry and sink runoff. That is also a quiet argument for consolidation in itself: the fewer different chemistries you tip down one drain, the easier it is to know that what reaches your tank or your soil is gentle. If you are on a rural block, our notes on septic and greywater safe cleaning for rural homes are worth a read alongside this.

Scent without the clutter

One quiet reason cupboards fill up is scent shopping: a citrus one for the kitchen, a fresh one for the bathroom, a different one again for the floors. The hidden cost is that each new smell usually arrives as another whole bottle of another formula, and that is more single use plastic dressed up as variety. You can keep the variety without keeping the extra plastic if the scent changes but the chemistry does not.

HomeKind uses the same core formula across four scents, Lemon Myrtle with Eucalyptus Radiata, Mandarin Peel with Rosemary, Peppermint with Pine Needle, and a Fragrance Free option for sensitive households or anyone who simply prefers no smell. Because the formula is identical, you can change the mood of a room without learning a new product or doubling up on bottles, and buying two or three together brings the per bottle cost down into the bundle range. Variety becomes a choice of essential oil, not a reason to crowd the cupboard.

When the under sink reset is not the whole answer

Honesty matters more than a tidy story, so here is where this reset is not the full fix.

• Heavy specialist jobs. A general cleaner, even a good enzyme one, is not an oven carbon stripper or a mould treatment for badly affected grout. For those, a targeted product used occasionally is reasonable. The aim is fewer everyday bottles, not pretending one product does literally everything.
• Unsealed or delicate surfaces. Raw timber, unsealed natural stone and some specialty finishes need their own care. Always test on an out of the way spot first and follow the surface maker's advice before you commit to a whole bench or floor.
• You barely clean. If you own one spray and use it twice a month, switching to a concentrate is still tidy and cheaper, but the plastic saving is modest. The big wins go to households that get through bottles fast.
• Binge tossing. Throwing out usable product to feel decluttered is the opposite of cutting waste. Use it up first, every time. Decluttering and reducing plastic are not the same goal.

Keeping the cupboard clear long term

The reset is the easy part. Staying reset is the habit. Three simple rules keep the under sink cupboard from quietly refilling with single use plastic.

• One in, one out, but for jobs not bottles. Before buying any new cleaning product, ask which existing job it duplicates. If something already covers it, do not buy it.
• Refill, do not repurchase. When a spray runs low, top it up from the concentrate rather than buying a new trigger off the shelf.
• Review every season. A two minute glance every few months catches the slow creep before it becomes another full cupboard.

If you want to extend the same thinking, the next biggest plastic offender is usually the laundry and the broader cleaning routine. Our guide to what to look for in non toxic cleaning products gives you a room by room lens for the same kind of reset elsewhere.

Where HomeKind fits

HomeKind is an Australian eco cleaning brand built around exactly this idea: fewer bottles, less single use plastic, one well made plant based concentrate doing the everyday work. The reason the brand exists is the cupboard in this article, repeated across hundreds of homes. The All in One Cleaner Concentrate is 1L at $39.99, with bundle pricing for two or three bottles and the option to mix scents, so a household can stock a year of cleaning in one small, refillable system rather than a rolling supply of throwaway triggers.

The concentrate is in stock now, and the concentrate is in stock, so you can order today and have it posted same day if you order before 1pm, otherwise the next business day. If the under sink reset in this article appealed to you, the concentrate is the piece that makes it stick, because it is the thing you refill into the bottles you kept. You can read the full detail on the product page, or get in touch at sales@homekindco.com.au.