The bottle is made from upcycled debris from the North Pacific Gyre.
Method, the company that used green chemistry to turn age-old concepts for making and marketing soap on their head, has come up with another innovation that explodes a long-held idea — that the trash trapped in the North Pacific Gyre is unredeemable.
Working with Envision Plastics in Southern California, Method came up with a model for collecting and upcycling some of the debris that’s swirling in the currents of the gyre, a swath of ocean covering 20 million square kilometers.
By some estimates, the amount of plastic awash in the ocean is twice the size of Texas and in some areas the ratio of plastic to plankton is now 10 parts of plastic to 1 part of plankton, according to Jared Blumenfeld, the head of the EPA in the Pacific Southwest.
“We asked ourselves, ‘What if we could take some of the plastic that’s floating in the North Pacific Gyre and make bottles out of it?,’ ” said Adam Lowry, who founded Method 10 years ago with business partner Eric Ryan. “Well, we did it.”
Source: GreenBiz.com
By Leslie Guevarra
David Guion
September 22nd, 2011
I’m sure glad someone’s doing more about that mess in the ocean besides hand-wringing. How do they separate little plastic particles from the plankton? What sort of scale would be required for an initiative like this to start reducing the volume of floating junk? Anyway, it’s a great start.