Turning the ‘Ocean Garbage Patch’ Into Packaging
Somewhere in the vicinity of Hawaii, a huge mass of plastic debris floats in the Pacific. And that’s just a fraction of the waste that’s bobbing around out there. Compared to the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” one plastic soap bottle may not seem like much. But if that one bottle is mass produced by soap-maker Method, it could turn out to make a big difference.
At least, that’s the hope. To create the bottle, Method employees and volunteers from Sustainable Coastlines and the Kokua Hawaii Foundation scoured Hawaii’s shores, picking up more than 3,000 pounds of beached plastic, including a still-inflated basketball from Japan and a Korean Coke bottle.
Method, which makes designer home cleaning products, recycled that plastic to make 10 percent of the plastic that goes into the Ocean bottle (the other 90 percent is recycled, too, just not from the ocean).
The “sea minerals” soap, which won’t be available until November, is a 2-in-1 dish and hand cleaner, but we don’t really care about that. Like Calvin and Hobbes, who often found the boxes more entertaining than the toys that came in them, Method is acknowledging that it’s not just about the product — the packaging can be just as important. It’s grey color is the unadulterated hue of ground-up, recycled plastic, and the designers textured the bottle to loosely mimic a sea urchin.
Don’t worry though — unlike the spiny sea creature that inspired the design, Method’s soap is made to be soft on hands.
http://www.wired.com/design/2012/07/method-soap-bottle-from-ocean-plastic/
