Green Scene

Choosing a Zero Bar rather than a bottle of shampoo or using a Spaza Store fabric bowl cover instead of clingwrap is about more than zero waste: it’s about incorporating sustainable items into our daily lives – and keeping it local.

- ASHLEIGH ROMAN

After developing a successful and Proudly South African manufacturing company, Bruce Turner decided to open his factory doors to an eco-friendly project, and so Zero Bar was born: cruelty-free, sustainable, and environmentally friendly shampoo and body bars.

Have you always been an entrepreneur?

After studying, I starting working for Crabtree & Evelyn, an English and American bath and body brand with a strong English heritage. I worked there for about 13 years and spent a lot of time on the shop floor, learning about retail and importing. All our products were shipped in from Wales.

Then I got fed up with importing. We can’t keep exporting raw stuff and importing the final products – we need to make the products ourselves. I’d visited a few factories around the world and had seen what manufacturing looked like; I never understood why we couldn’t do it in SA. So I resigned from Crabtree and started The Bespoke Amenities Company. We manufacture and supply hospitality cosmetics.

So Zero Bar is the younger sibling?

Yes! I’ve always had the itch to be more involved in the consumer side of things because everything we do is business to business and hospitality-based. In terms of sustainability, we are doing an International Standards Organisation certification in environmental management and are becoming carbon neutral certified.

What is a shampoo bar?