The Semitrailer That Changed Everything: The Story Behind Re-Sparkle It

By Derek O'Neil, Sparkle Wellness Co-Founder

I want to share the story about how our new composting program, Re-Sparkle It, came to be.

The first seeds were sown in late 2018, as we began operations at our newly established Sparkle Wellness production facility in Granbury, Texas. Up until that point, dealing with thousands of units of our products had been a spreadsheet exercise: Order X thousand units from this contract manufacturer, deliver to that logistics company, which would then ship out to our e-commerce customers.

We didn’t actually see the physicality of our inventory. The physical space that the monthly turnover of product occupied was conceptual and simply just a set of numbers on a report that was largely meaningless without a frame of reference.

So, as the first semitrailer turned up at the new Granbury facility full of empty PET plastic bottles into which we would be packaging our Skin Boost product, a quick succession of realizations hit me.

The first realization: Wow, that is a big truck carrying a lot of plastic for what seems like not that many plastic bottles. 

The next wow: Realizing how many more of these semitrailers carting full loads of conventional plastic there were going to be as we took over the entirety of physically making and shipping our products.

The final and most significant wow: All this plastic might get used for a month or two and could get recycled after use two times, three times, maybe more — but ultimately, it is destined for a landfill.

This PET plastic is going to be hanging around in a hole in the ground somewhere for a long, long, time, or, worse, will eventually break down into smaller plastic pieces, potentially spreading through the broader ecosystem, and there is nothing good about any of that.

Having read news stories about the devastation that plastic pollution causes — from the five gyres in the oceans, whales with their stomachs filled with plastics to species of birds being wiped out in remote parts of the world, it weighed heavily on me that we were contributing to the plastic pollution problem.

It was a conflicting moment for me. This was a moment of pride when we were starting our own manufacturing, but was ruptured by a sense of despair that we were contributing to the plastic pollution problem in such a clearly visible way.

There has to be a better approach. 

Yes, conventional plastic offers a superior capability to protect food products, ensuring it has the best chance to remain uncompromised from when it leaves the factory until it is consumed by the customer, but that protective property is exactly what makes it a long-term environmental pollutant.

Ideally, there would be a solution designed to serve both the short-term need to protect food and have a way to avoid inflicting long-term damage to the environment.

Our journey so far

With that moment of clarity about the problem with conventional plastics firmly seeded in my realm of awareness, I soon learned of the emerging science and nascent industry starting to offer compostable plastics.

Compostable plastics promise to be just as described. The compostable plastic will protect the food inside for the life of the product, yet, in the right conditions that allow proper controlled composting, compostable plastic will turn back into nutrient-rich soil, avoiding landfills and the creation of harmful smaller plastic pieces and microplastics.

On first learning of the emerging compostable plastics in 2019 and 2020, the packaging offerings available were only part of the full vision of non-impactful plastic.

Our first generation of packaging.

Many of our customers will remember the paper pouches that we originally started using in 2020, as we launched our Joint Boost, Muscle Boost and Osteo Boost. Those kraft-paper pouches were only 60% compostable, so they couldn’t actually be composted as the other 40% was conventional plastic. We still chose to use those pouches, even though they weren’t the complete solution, as it meant that we would be spending our money backing the early stages of compostable plastics, with our funds hopefully contributing to support the emerging industry that was pursuing the full solution we wanted to see become a reality.

In 2023, the first fully compostable pouches came to market, and we began migrating from the partially compostable kraft-paper pouches to the fully compostable versions — the white pouches we now use for our pouched products.

Going into 2026, we still have our Skin Boost range in the original PET bottles, mostly as we have not had the manufacturing capacity to convert it to pouches. 

On the tail-end of 2025, we made a major investment into pouch-filling automation machinery in Granbury, and the new machinery will allow us to migrate away from the PET bottles and have all our products in compostable pouches in 2026.

Our new compostable pouches.

The missing piece: Why we need Re-Sparkle It

But here's the reality: compostable pouches can be domestically composted, but there is not certainty in domestic composting that the plastics will fully decompose, and so it is better to compost the pouches in an industrial compost facility, where the conditions of the compost and the entirety of the compost process is controlled, so that the outcome of no plastic pollution can become a certainty. 

The vast majority of American households do not have access to the industrial composting facilities needed to break down these pouches with certainty. 

A significant gap exists where compostable plastics have now become a reality, but the ability for these plastics to be composted in a controlled manner is yet to be widely established.

We realized we need to take responsibility for closing this gap and so birthed Re-Sparkle It, our composting program that aims to collect back all empty pouches to ensure they get industrially composted, turning potential waste into rich soil, just as intended.

Having started the Re-Sparkle It in September 2025, we are now actively receiving back the pouches via the return-to-sender prepaid envelopes. 

Our first stack of returned pouches.

We are delighted that a large number of customers are participating. We are seeing that 30% of the compostable pouches shipped to customers are being sent back to us.

Please keep it going. 30% is great, 50% would be better, and if one dares to dream, 100% would be ideal!

A note from a customer.

Our next step in 2026 is to begin industrially composting the pouches.

We have designed a prototype for the composting facility, intending to construct the prototype in the first months of 2026. With the prototype facility in place, we are hoping that by mid to late 2026, we’ll be scaling up the ability to have certainty in the nonpolluting decomposition of these compostable plastics.

The Re-Sparkle It program is a vital step in changing the environmental story of our products, and it means the world to us to finally have this piece in place. To learn more, visit our Re-Sparkle It page.