Zero Co ceased trading on 30 April 2025 after six years, closing while still solvent. If you refilled with Zero Co, the honest replacements to look at are concentrates and refills that state their yield plainly, need no mail back step, no subscription, and are safe for septic systems.
What happened to Zero Co
Zero Co launched in 2019 out of Byron Bay with a genuinely good idea: send you cleaning liquids in refillable dispensers, you mail the empties back, they get refilled and reused. It worked well enough to reach $10.79 million in revenue in FY24.
It ceased trading on 30 April 2025. Worth being precise about this, because plenty of write ups have not been: the business closed while it was still solvent. It was not administration and it was not a collapse. FY24 carried a pre tax operating loss of just over $336,000, about half the previous year's. Reporting by SmartCompany and Inside FMCG attributed the decision to problems that followed the late 2024 move to the ForeverFill closed loop packaging, which the business could not resolve.
As of August 2026 the zeroco.com.au storefront is gone. It returns a Shopify error page reading "This store is unavailable", with no notice to former customers at all. That is why you are probably reading this.
It is not only Zero Co
If it feels like the refill aisle has thinned out, you are not imagining it. Pleasant State wound down too, with trading ceasing on 27 January 2026, and pleasantstate.com is now a parked domain listed for sale.
Two of the better known Australian refill brands closing inside two years says something useful about the model rather than about the people who built them. Mail back refills ask a lot of a household: keep the empties, pack them, get to a post box, wait. That is a lot of steps between you and a clean bench. The brands that are still standing mostly ask for fewer steps.
What to use instead
Here is the honest state of the category. Every price and claim below was read from each brand's own product page on 15 August 2026, and we have written "not stated" wherever a brand does not tell you something, rather than filling the gap ourselves.
We make HomeKind, so treat this as a maker's comparison and check the numbers yourself. The links are there for exactly that.
| Product | Price | Size | Per litre as sold | Concentrate? | Makes | Per usable litre | Septic safe |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HomeKind All in One Concentrate | $39.99 | 1L | $39.99 | Yes | Up to 100 litres | About 40c | Yes |
| For All | $34.90 | 1L | $34.90 | Yes | "Up to 100 spray bottles", bottle size not stated | Not calculable from stated figures | Yes |
| Koh Universal Cleaner | $19.95 | 2L | $9.98 | Not stated | Not stated | Not calculable from stated figures | Yes |
| ecostore Refill Concentrate | $9.00 | 100ml | $90.00 | Yes, "10x concentrated" | Two 500ml sprays, so 1 litre | $9.00 | Yes, and greywater |
| ecostore Multipurpose Cleaner | $6.99 | 500ml | $13.98 | No dilution step given | n/a | $13.98 | Yes, and greywater |
| Zero Co | Ceased trading 30 April 2025. No storefront. | ||||||
| Pleasant State | Ceased trading 27 January 2026. Domain parked. | ||||||
Prices and details checked 15 August 2026, using each brand's regular price, not a sale price. Prices move, so check before you buy.
How to read that table
Most of the category does not tell you what a litre becomes. That is the difference that actually matters with concentrates, and it is where the comparison gets hard. We say a 1 litre bottle makes up to 100 litres, which is where about 40 cents a litre comes from. For All says "up to 100 spray bottles" but does not state the bottle size on the product page, so nobody can convert that to litres without guessing. Koh does not say whether Universal Cleaner is a concentrate at all, so a per usable litre figure cannot be worked out from what they publish. ecostore is the clearest of the lot: 100ml makes two 500ml sprays, which is one usable litre for $9.00.
We have left those cells as "not calculable" rather than filling them in. Multiplying an unstated bottle size, or assuming a product is ready to use when the brand never says so, would produce a number that flatters us and cannot be defended. If those brands publish their yields, the sums change and we will update this page.
How concentrate refills differ from mail back refills
If Zero Co was your system, the closest replacement in spirit is a concentrate, not another mail back scheme. The difference is in the steps.
| Mail back refill, the Zero Co model | Concentrate in one bottle | |
|---|---|---|
| What arrives | Pre mixed liquid, mostly water, in a pouch or dispenser | Concentrate. You add the water from your tap |
| What you post back | Empties, packed and taken to a post box | Nothing |
| Subscription | Usually yes | No subscription with HomeKind. Buy when you run out |
| What you are shipping | Water, mostly, in both directions | One litre, once |
| Steps between delivery and clean bench | Unpack, decant, keep empties, pack, post | Mix a spray bottle |
None of this makes the closed loop model a bad idea. It is a genuinely better idea environmentally if people stick with it. The evidence from the last two years is simply that a lot of households did not, and two brands built on it have now closed.
If you want to check the maths yourself
Our numbers are all on the site and we would rather you tested them than took our word. You can work out the cost per bottle on the calculator, read the dilution chart to see how far a litre actually goes, or compare the packs on the shop page.
And if you are simply after a like for like replacement for a Zero Co habit, the short version is: one bottle of concentrate, no subscription, no posting anything back, and a yield the brand is willing to put in writing.
