From Beach To Bottle: Method Tackles Ocean Plastic With New Soap. Plus, Take the Ocean Plastic Pledge

With Hurricane Sandy terrorizing the East coast and a Nor’Easter piling onto the madness, the last few weeks have been devastating for all-too-many of my friends up North—friends who are still climbing out from under downed trees and power lines, who are still staring down 30-degree weather sans heat and electricity, who waited hours on lines for gas rations and had to figure out how to feed their babies out of cans and boxes and wash their little bodies in cold water. It was October, and Mother Nature got gangsta, manhandling the most beautiful month of Fall like it’s the dead of the most treacherous of winters.

Mother Nature has her reasons. I’ll hazard and guess and chalk it up to our blatant disrespect of her first love, Earth. I asked in a recent post why we continue to pretend as if our actions—our overdependence on oil, our lust for wasting energy, our gluttonous usage of water and our devil-may-care attitude toward pollution—aren’t contributing to this environmental wrath. The silence, as usual, was deafening. But that doesn’t change the fact that each of us needs to do more—must do more—to change the course. To do our part to at least try to make it better.

This is why I’m so proud of Method, the folks behind my favorite “green” cleaning products. The company, whose mission is to bring pretty, environmentally-friendly, chemical-free, smell good cleaning products to the masses, puts its money where its mouth is not only by creating quality, safe products for our consumption, but also by doing its part to help clean up our planet. By making chemical-free products, putting them in recyclable containers, reducing the carbon footprint needed to deliver their goods and spreading the word on how we can do better by our planet, Method shows and proves on a consistent basis that it really does give a doggone about this beautiful Earth.

This month, Method went even further when it launched its Method Ocean Plastic 2-in-1 Dish + Hand Soap, the world’s first bottle made with a blend of recovered ocean plastic and post-consumer recycled plastic. And get this: Method didn’t buy the ocean plastic for its bottles; Method employees and local beach cleanup groups hand-collected more than one ton of plastic from the beaches of Hawaii to make the bottles!

There was a method to Method’s madness: it’s estimated that several million tons of plastic pollutes our oceans every year, causing serious damage to our environment. Trash and plastic accumulates in the ocean creating massive garbage “gyres”; one of those gyres is currently larger than the size of Texas. Texas, dude. And all that garbage is not only floating in our oceans, our fish are swallowing and wallowing in it, which means all that plastic is ending up on our dinner plates. Um, ewa.

So Method made the Ocean Plastic 2-in-1 Dish + Hand Soap to bring awareness of ocean pollution to our attention. The Ocean Plastic bottle design is inspired by a sea urchin and the dark gray color is actually the natural color of recovered plastic after it’s been melted down and molded.

Now, neither I nor Method is suggesting that making bottles out of trash will stop a hurricane from barreling through Manhattan, but those bottles sure do a helluva job to show other companies that they can make a difference by being much more thoughtful about what, exactly, they put their products in.

Check out the video below for the story behind Method’s Ocean Plastic initiative, and click here for some primo info on ocean plastic and its effects on our environment. Plus, take the Ocean Plastic pledge on Method’s Facebook page for a chance to win a $100 gift card to Whole Foods. (Contest ends November 30.)

And, of course, go cop the Ocean Plastic 2-in-1 Dish + Hand Soap at your local Whole Foods in the US and online at Methodhome.com.

And while you’re stocking your kitchen and bathrooms with the goodness that is the Ocean Plastic soap, pick up some of Method’s Smarty Dish Plus Dishwasher Tablets. Method reformulated the dishwasher tablets so that they can tackle dirty dishes in hard water. I’ve been using them in my dishwasher and pushing the limits on how dirty, greasy and funky my dishes are when I load them, just so that I could make sure the tablets not only get my dishes clean, but my glasses, silverware and plates actually look good and spot-free when they come out. Score! The dishes are clean. There are no spots. And the bonus is that they got that way without my using dirty chemicals like phosphates and bleach to get them that way. Oh, and the new, lightweight pouch the tablets come in? It uses 87 percent less plastic than the original bag, and I’m guessing WAY less plastic than other leading brands of dishwashing detergent.

Even more awesomeness: Buy Smarty Dish Plus dishwasher tabs on Methodhome.com (or well.ca for Canadians) between November 15 and 30 and get 15 percent off your purchase price(while supplies last). Just enter the code SMARTDISH upon checkout.

Clean Happy!

So you know: I partnered with Method to write about my family’s experiences with the company’s environmentally-friendly cleaning products. Yes, I’m getting a check for this. No, they’re not paying me to say nice things about their products. As always, my experiences and opinions are my own.

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