We’re incredibly proud to announce that our cleaning products have prevented over four million plastic bottles from ever existing!
That’s a lot of plastic. To put it into perspective, the four million bottles we’ve eliminated from existence would have been about 651,423 pounds (326 tons) of plastic. This is about the same weight as:
- 109,439,095 ping pong balls (that’s 109 million)
- 1,974,010 bananas (that’s a lot of potassium)
- 32,571 car tires
- 26,057 toddlers (good luck getting them to stand together on a scale)
- 5,011 newborn giraffes
- 658 grand pianos
- 163 Art Institute of Chicago Lions
Preventing plastic production goes beyond preventing plastic waste
More realistically speaking, 326 tons is the weight of over 53 million single-use plastic grocery bags. It’s also the amount of trash thrown away each month by a town of 5,429 people.
Waste is a huge part of the plastic pollution problem, but it’s not the whole story.
More than a million tons of plastic are made every day as global plastic production continues to rise. Study after study has shown that plastic is hazardous to people and the planet throughout its entire life cycle:
- Plastic production has been linked to increased risk of numerous diseases, including lung and cardiovascular diseases and cancer. Pollution from production facilities also affects the surrounding community with an increased risk of premature birth, low birth weight, childhood leukemia, and other diseases.
- Plastics used in consumer products often include endocrine-disrupting chemicals and toxic additives. Plastics are also known to absorb and concentrate toxic chemicals in the environment.
- Plastic waste breaks down into increasingly smaller particles that carry these concentrated toxins to every corner of the planet. Humans are increasingly consuming microplastics through food, water, and air.
- Plastic recycling poses similar problems as plastic recycling, and is not technically or economically viable at scale, despite claims from the petrochemical industry.
We believe that the best approach is to turn off plastic pollution at the source by eliminating as much plastic production as possible. We design our cleaning products and packaging without single-use plastic. That means no bioplastics, dissolvable pods or sheets, plastic jugs, bottles, caps, wrappers, liners, styrofoam, or tape. The only plastic in our product line comes with our reusable bottles and closed loop bucket program, where these plastics are intended to be used again and again.
Measuring our plastic reduction impact
We made the following assumptions to calculate the weight of the plastic eliminated by our products:
A single-use jug used for laundry detergent or bleach weighs about 0.29 lbs (130g).
- Each Laundry Powder and Oxygen Brightener canister and refill prevents one jug weighing 0.29 lbs (130 g)
- Each Laundry Powder bucket offsets 18 jugs for a total of 5.2 lbs (2,359 g).
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Each Oxygen Brightener bucket offers 20 jugs for a total of 5.8 lbs (2,630 g).
A single-use bottle used for cleaner or liquid soap weighs about 0.12 lbs (55 g).
- Each All-Purpose Home Cleaner bottle, Gentle Home Cleaning Scrub canister, and Bath & Body Soap bar offsets one single-use bottle weighing 0.12 lbs (55 g).
- Each Soap Stick stain remover offsets one liquid stain remover bottle weighing about 0.14 lbs (64 g).
- Each Dish Soap bar and pack of All-Purpose Home Cleaner refill tablets prevents about three single-use bottles for a total of 0.36 lbs (165 g).
- Each pack of Foaming Hand Soap refill tablets is equivalent to six single-use soap bottles for a total of 0.72 lbs (330 g).
- Each Gentle Home Cleaning Scrub bucket replaces 53 bottles of cleaner for a total of 6.36 lbs (2,915 g).
Thank you for helping us make our goal a reality. Onward to diverting 10 million plastic bottles, then 20 million! Then 200 million!