It's completely antithetical to the environmentally conscious mission to build a product that is going to produce significantly more waste than chalk balls. Chalk residue is a short-term eyesore, but plastic waste lives for hundreds of years in landfills.
If you're going to target environmentally conscious customers then your packaging has to be eco-friendly too.
For environmentally friendly packaging (recycled alu tubes) to be viable at our small scale we need to produce a LOT more. In the meantime we try to improve our packaging and offset some of the damage we do by planting one tree per product sold, which is roughly a 20-30% hit on our margins. Personally I think it’s impossible to be sustainable. Working towards reaching sustainability IS possible. So that’s what we do.
We looked into bio plastics and bamboo for both the tube and closing cap. It’s easy enough to find bamboo-based biodegradable tubes but the closing cap is pretty much always still normal plastic. Biodegradable plastic also has its controversies: it won’t degrade in clean ways outside of commercial composting facilities. There’s also a bamboo-based plastic controversy around toxicity of the product in e.g. bamboo-plastic cups.
If you're going to target environmentally conscious customers then your packaging has to be eco-friendly too.