Lubricants & sustainability

Engine oil is not something most people associate with environmental choices. You buy it, pour it in, and eventually it gets drained. The packaging that carries it from the factory to your hands is rarely part of the conversation. It should be.

The packaging problem nobody talks about

A standard 1-litre rigid HDPE plastic bottle — the type that every major lubricant brand uses — weighs roughly 80 to 100 grams empty. That's the plastic cost of packaging 1 litre of oil. Multiply that by the volume of oil sold across Southeast Asia's two-wheeler market alone, and the plastic waste figure becomes significant. Most of this packaging ends up in landfill or, in markets with less developed recycling infrastructure, worse.

The conversation in the lubricants industry has focused almost entirely on the oil itself — drain intervals, re-refining used oil, bio-based base stocks. Packaging has been largely ignored, because changing it requires engineering investment that incumbents have little incentive to make.

Why we chose the flexible pouch

A flexible spout pouch containing 1 litre of oil uses 80–90% less plastic by weight than an equivalent rigid bottle. The reduction is structural: a flexible pouch doesn't need the wall thickness required to make a rigid container self-supporting. The material is also easier to transport flat before filling, reducing logistics emissions per unit.

The pouch also has a practical advantage beyond the environmental one: once opened, the remaining oil can be resealed and stored without the drip-and-leak problem that comes with partially-used rigid bottles. Riders who do partial top-ups — a common practice in Southeast Asia where bikes are ridden daily — end up with less waste and less mess.

What we can't claim

We want to be honest about the limits of what we're doing. The flexible pouch uses less plastic, but it's still plastic. Multi-layer flexible packaging is more difficult to recycle than single-material rigid HDPE bottles in most markets. A smaller footprint is better than a larger one — but it isn't zero. We see the pouch as a meaningful step forward relative to the incumbent format, not as a complete solution to lubricant packaging sustainability.

The longer-term answer probably involves more recoverable packaging materials, take-back schemes in markets where infrastructure supports it, and industry-wide standards that don't exist yet. We'll follow those developments and adapt when the options are genuinely better, not just differently marketed.

The honest position

Sustainability in lubricants is a long way from solved. Used engine oil is a hazardous waste that requires careful disposal — most riders in Southeast Asia drain it into the ground or hand it to workshops that may or may not handle it responsibly. The industry's record on this is poor. We aren't fixing that with a pouch, and we won't pretend otherwise.

What we can do is make choices that are directionally better and be transparent about both the benefit and the limitation. The pouch uses less plastic. That's a real and measurable improvement over what came before. We say so, we quantify it, and we move on — no greenwashing required.