SimplyGood's Jeremy Lee on a mission to create green cleaning solutions

Its dehydrated cleaning products can be dissolved in reusable containers, reducing the need for single-use plastic packaging.

- By Therese Soh

Lee believes sustainability and profitability are not incompatible. BT FILE PHOTO

(BT FILE PHOTO)

SimplyGood founder and chief executive officer Jeremy Lee learnt that sustainable ventures can be profitable when he started his first social enterprise in university.

In 2017, Lee co-founded UglyGood, a food waste startup that converted fruit waste into high-value products such as animal feed, natural cleaning agents and essential oils.

While the company was eventually sold to a global small and medium-sized enterprise manufacturing house, the belief that a business’ profitability should be intrinsically tied to its impact carried over into his next social enterprise, SimplyGood — a cleantech startup founded in 2021 that aims to reduce single-use plastics.

“For SimplyGood, the more cleaning products we sell, the more single-use plastics and carbon emissions we save automatically,” said Lee, who won the Impact Leader Excellence Award in the individual category at the 2025 Sustainability Impact Awards, jointly presented by The Business Times and UOB.

With a mission to address the global fast-moving consumer goods plastic waste and carbon emissions crisis, SimplyGood manufactures cleaning products from laundry detergent to window cleaners.

But unlike most household cleaners that come in liquid form, the dry-based cleaning products it produces come in the form of dehydrated tablets or sheets. These can be dissolved in reusable containers, which reduces the need for single-use plastic packaging.

SimplyGood estimates that its products have prevented more than one million single-use plastics from entering landfills and around 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. Its products are used by over 40,000 households in Singapore and more than 100 companies.