Founded in 2022 with a mission to ‘unbottle the Australian drinks industry,’ Sydney-headquartered Refilled is expanding its scope into Asia.
According to a 2019 Reuters study, globally, some 1 million plastic bottles are bought each minute. That’s 60 million every hour, 1 billion 440 million per day, and a staggering 511 billion bottles or more purchased each year.
For seasoned Aussie entrepreneur Ryan Nelson, those numbers were too much to bear. After working out at a Sydney gym in 2021, Nelson was dismayed to find the water fountain broken. His only option to rehydrate came from a brightly lit vending machine packed with shiny plastic bottles.
“It was that afternoon I went home and started working on Refilled,” Nelson says.
Four years and four months later, the startup has raised $2 million in funding, installed 42 Refiller machines across the country, and clocked 448,000 instances where drinking containers were refilled rather than plastic bottles bought.
In Australia, Refilled machines can be found inside the offices of Meta, Databricks, Uber, Qualtrics, Google, Atlassian and Canva, and the Greenhouse Tech Hub inside Sydney’s Salesforce tower.
“Our first customers are some of the biggest and most recognisable companies in the world,” says Nelson. “What we’ve offered them is a way to keep employees happy, reduce workload for their office managers and save money on beverage costs.”
The company is now setting its socially minded sights on a heavily plasticised zone to north east of Australia.
Ben Gattie, is co-founder and CEO of Singapore’s The Working Capitol co-working space.
“With sustainable partners like Refilled, who champion the circular economy, we align with the Singapore Green Plan 2030,” says Gattie. “This initiative to reduce landfill waste by 30% by 2030 is a crucial goal, as Singapore ranks first in Asia for single-use plastic consumption.”
Gattie believes that nudging habits like refilling water bottles in the workplace will create a ripple effect, also shaping behaviour outside office hours.
“We encourage our members and community to adopt more conscious behaviours right where they work,” says Gattie.
Gamification is also used to drive sustainable behaviour adoption. The display on a Refiller machine showcases an office’s bottle eliminator ‘leaderboard’ and attributes C02 savings to users.
There are benefits to employers and their bottom lines, too.
Eva Milbank is the Sydney office manager of WPP, the world’s largest advertising agency.
“Refilled has significantly benefited my role,” says Milbank. “It’s saving us money and I’m spending much less time ordering, stocking, and lifting heavy cases of drinks.”
Rather than maneuvering weighty individual bottles, Refilled does the heavy lifting of pouring chilled and filtered tap water into reusable bottles owned by individuals. Australian-made flavours like mango, lemon, strawberry and watermelon can be added too.
Trent Bagnall from Melt Ventures, a Newcastle-based VC and advisory firm specialising in advanced manufacturing, says that the Refiller was the best prototype he had ever seen. Melt went on to lead Refilled’s 2023 $1.3 million seed round. Those funds were used to build the expensive hardware and deploy around 40 Refiller machines into offices to be used.
The company is now focused on international expansion.
“A year on from our seed funding, our mission to unbottle the Australian beverage industry and save 100 million single-use plastic bottles from landfill has gone from strength to strength,” says Nelson.
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