What's already out there?

Tom's of Maine

Tom's of Maine is a company that supplies oral and personal care products. Maine farms a great amount of potatoes and so what Tom's of Maine is doing is looking into packaging their products using a Bio-plastic that they are attempting to create from using PLA (Polylactic Acid) combined with potatoes that are not sold for consumption. This is a great idea because if this plan works out, Tom's of Maine would be using local resources for it's packaging resulting in less energy needed to transport the potato Bio-plastic to the packing warehouse.

Method

Method is a company that produces sanitary products and has actively put in a serious amount of effort to do its part for the environment. The ocean is one of the biggest casualties of plastic pollution and so what Method have done is organised their team of employees, along with local activists, to sweep the beaches of Hawaii and collect washed up plastic that has polluted the ocean. 

Working with Envision Plastics, the collected plastic waste is then ground down to a grey resin and combined along with other recycled plastic waste which creates a blend that can be reshaped into new soap bottles ready for sale. 

Greenbox Pizza Box

The pizza box packaging is a great innovative design that takes into consideration the material used, practicality of use, the re-use and the disposal. The Greenbox Pizza Box is made from recycled cardboard and is the same shape and size as your conventional pizza box, only with a few extra details. The box lid has perforations that when torn provides the consumer four sections that act as serving plates for the pizza. The rest of the box folds into a smaller box that acts as storage for leftover pizza, fitting into any size fridge/freezer. after the box has served it's purpose the cardboard is 100% compostable, releasing all the resources that made up the box back to the earth and improving the quality of the soil.

in.gredients

in.gredients have become the first package free and zero waste grocery store in the US ...And obviously  this is not going to work for a paint company because there is only so much paint that a person needs, whereas people will need to continually buy food, but it shows a great concept for refilling already used consumer packaging resulting in total sustainability.


Bamboo Bottle Company

The Bamboo Bottle Company have produced a bottle that instead of using plastic uses a glass inner container for the liquid and a bamboo outer shell for protection. The different parts are also held together with a #4 PP plastic components on the ends. Bamboo is a great material as it is strong, protective and most importantly grown from the earth and so of course is disposable back to the earth.

http://www.sustainableisgood.com