The Biodegradable Jar Is Here

The modern human experience is dominated with marketing of all types. We are blasted with commercial marketing of anything you can spend money on. In turn we have become increasingly sophisticated and maybe even a little cynical of most marketing claims. How do we make sense between competing marketing claims without a chemistry degree? We rely on third party certification to verify marketing claims of all sorts. The USDA Organic is a marketing term that derives its meaning by enforcing its rules on growers or manufacturers who choose to use their logo. It’s completely voluntary. The USDA Organic logo is a trademark with a heavy duty meaning.

A little background is in order; natural body care didn’t come into mainstream use until Burt’s Bees TM marketed their ‘natural’ body care products in the early 1990’s. Before long, the term ‘natural’ became so over-used that it became meaningless. Adding to that, consumers couldn’t tell the difference between ‘natural’ and conventional products by reading the ingredient panels which were filled with chemical names. In the early 2000’s ‘organic’ was a new term used for body care products which began following the same trajectory as natural with similar chemical loaded ingredient panels. But then something unintended happened.

In 2005, the USDA allowed non-food products to be certified to the food standard provided that they strictly adhere to their food rules. This was a happy accident that inadvertently led to the strictest and most meaningful body care standard anywhere, far superior to the European and Japanese organic standards. How could this happen, here in the U.S., the land of GMO and lagging environmental awareness? Here’s why: in Europe and Japan, body care and cosmetic brand owners were present when the organic standards were drafted. They insisted that specific non-food chemicals were absolutely necessary for full product lines to be developed. When the USDA drafted the food standard, body care manufacturers weren’t present. Then a few years later the standard governing body, the “National Organic Program” allowed many non-food products, including body care products to be certified to the food standard provided that they adhered to all the organic food rules.

But wait a minute. Why was natural or organic marketing terms for body care products ever invented and used in the first place? What were Burt’s customers responding to? Why were conventional products not good enough any longer? In a word, health. Most of us don’t understand the long chemical names, but we have good reason to distrust them. So many times we have seen chemicals that marketers insist are safe and even good for us, then turn out to be harmful, dangerous and even cancer causing. Think little children running along the DDT sprayer trucks in the 1950’s, and all the chemicals inflicted on us since then. Natural marketers say that their chemicals are safe. When a chemical is shown to cause some harm, the story changes to “we use such a small amount, it doesn’t matter”, use our product, it makes you look younger!

Thus, we are in a state of competing marketers saying that their chemicals are safe. This creates a kind of relativity that could spin Einstein’s head; but really, it just a lot of argument. Nothing but arguments filled with images of good looking models and loving mothers with babies.

As consumers, the few of us who are Organic Essence were instantly attracted to third party food grade certified organic because it simply steps right out of the argument. We don’t need to argue that our body care chemicals are safe since there aren’t any. What a relief. When I eat organic food and use organic products of any type, I get a particular feeling of calmness and ease that comes from knowing that I’m getting better nutrition and the absence of chemicals. I think that most people know what this feeling is if we care to connect with it.

In a word, organic is mainly about “absence”: the lack of harmful chemicals. But there is more to it than that, and the second word for organic is “immunity”. Let me explain. All organisms are competing in life. Almost all have parasites and predators because it’s a free for all in the natural world. Plants and animals have well developed immunities. For instance, the cinnamon tree and tea tree have developed strong immunities to fungus and lavender and peppermint repel bugs. Often the nutritive qualities we seek in foods are directly related to plant immunity. When plants are goosed with chemical fertilizers and protected from pests with pesticides, their immunity becomes weakened, losing the benefits we are seeking in the first place. The result of modern industrialized agricultural production is increasingly empty, bland and laced with chemical residues.

Organic body care matters. It is interesting that the first adopters of organic products are mothers with babies and cancer survivors. People who think zero is the right amount of chemical exposure their babies or they need. Zero added chemicals feel good. Fewer chemicals all down line from the farm makes our personal immunity stronger. It feels good to get out of the argument.

I believe people of all ages perceive the inexorable march towards environmental degradation and accompanying physical harm to ourselves. A common generalization is that young people are more aware of the dysfunction of modern practices; yet studies show that it is older people who actually seek and prefer sustainable solutions. There is growing concern among all groups of people that our species in danger  because of our unconscious but willful harm to our environment due to short sighted desire for immediate efficiency.

We have inherited tremendous wealth from those who have gone before us. Inventions such as language, medicine and science can rightly be seen as gifts from our ancestors. It can be said that the invention of money allows the existence of cities and our burgeoning populations more than any other single invention. As a species, we truly enjoy unprecedented wealth. Yet the price of this wealth which as brought efficiencies and scale nurtures the growing seeds of its own destruction. Accelerating environmental degradation is becoming increasingly apparent to most, and even those who choose to ignore these issues still experience its harmful effects in their lives.

Many people who care about these issues feel frustrated because there is little that they can actually do to make a difference. For many whom need transportation the choice is between toxic gasoline automobiles and toxic electric automobiles. And then, wonderful sounding solutions such as corn based ethanol actually add to the greater problem. It has been shown to take equal amounts of petroleum to make a given amount of ethanol. Adding to the boondoggle, the intensive corn production involved destroys land fertility and adds to environmental degradation with all of the toxic inputs monoculture crops require.

Single use plastic is garnering attention because of growing awareness about huge plastic garbage patches in the oceans. Out-of-sight landfills are increasingly packed with stuff that doesn’t break down quickly and when it does degrade, seriously toxic chemicals escape. The consumer industry is responding with perky marketing touting the use of recycled plastic in their packages. At best this approach only marginally slows the burgeoning problem. It has been reported that the average American discards over 63 pounds of single use plastic every year - recycled or not. We have been told and it would seem to our senses that plastic is inert. To the contrary, all chemically transformed crude oil is toxic. The stuff of plastic is a mild poison. With the never ending drip of exposure, significant levels of exotic chemicals are building up in our bodies and in the environment.

At the supermarket, consumers are presented with an endless variety of empty choices. Entire classes of products are only available packaged in plastic. For example, if you want shampoo, you can only get it with a plastic bottle. Product categories that formerly were packaged in glass are moving to plastic. Liquid vegetable oils are increasingly being packaged in plastic bottles primarily due to the ‘carbon cost’ of moving heavy glass around. The problem is that vinyl chloride, a known carcinogen, is leaching into your food. But then, water that is packaged in plastic bottles has always had a plastic taste, and as a society we have adapted to it.

It is my dream to provide real choice in the dialog about single use plastic. When all aspects of plastic use are considered, it’s a very expensive and ultimately inefficient way to package consumer goods. In many instances, such as water for example, reusing containers is the preferable answer, in others reuse is  less practical.

I believe that just about all single use plastic can and eventually will be replaced with sustainable alternatives. Most of recorded human history has had the use of biodegradable packaging. We don’t have to go back to wrapping meat in animal skins or oilcloth either. It has only been in the lifetimes of people alive today that single use plastic has taken over. Its time to move on to materials that are more rational.

We developed a paper based biodegradable jar and lip balm tube that we’re using with Organic Essence products. Over 250 million plastic lip balm tubes are discarded every year in the US, and once we can get the price of the Eco Tube down to the price of plastic, other manufacturers will adopt the  Eco Tube and help make a real difference of taking out significant amounts of plastic out of the waste stream. Other packages on the horizon are a completely biodegradable toothpaste tube that will work for a wide variety of products. Over 700 million plastic toothpaste tubes are discarded every year; the number of all plastic paste tubes is many times that. A rigid biodegradable bottle that will contain liquids such as soaps, lotions and shampoos. A biodegradable pump for soaps, lotions and sprays. An adapter that will mate a reusable plastic pump with fibrous containers. Vitamin bottles, tea packages, and various closures that will work with paper based packages. Going a little farther afield, we have developed a rigid produce basket that will replace the plastic ‘clamshell’ packages that are used for produce such as spinach and strawberries.

Literally all single use plastic packaging can be replaced with practical biodegradable solutions or with reusable containers with no major disruption in our way of doing things. However, there is a large vested interest in current single use plastic packaging. It will take significant consumer demand to make change happen.

To bring these new packages to reality, we have formed a company called Eco Vision to bring our vision of rational single use packaging to fruition. We think the goal of keeping wasteful plastic from polluting the environment is essential. I am seeking the help of like minded people to help turn the destructive tide of plastic.

May we all enjoy a cleaner future.

Thanks for coming to the Organic Essence website. I’d like to introduce myself; I’m Ellery West, one of the founders. Everybody seems to have titles but my function is best described as Navigator. I find or bushwack the path, avoid the cliffs and mud bogs to get us where we need to go. Our travels have taken us to wonderful and magic places, figuratively and physically. These travels are what I’d like to share with you.

We’ve been making body care products for many years; mainly natural bar soap, lotion and creams. In 2002, we innovated Lotion To Go, which is like a giant lip balm that is used as a lotion stick. In 2006, the USDA produced its “Final Rule” which set organic standards. Because ‘organic’ means sustainable agriculture and health, we founded Organic Essence and committed it to making only certified organic products.

USDA Organic is a food standard. So why should it mean anything for bodycare products? It matters because of what it exclues; chemicals such as detergents, preservatives, fragrances and dyes. The current body care industry is like the Wild West, everybody seems to be shooting natural and organic claims from the hip and anything goes. Standing high above this, USDA Organic means something. I call it the “Gold Standard” because it communicates so much about a product, and something about the people standing behind it.

Like many, I thought that organic equals green. Initially, the organic movement was founded on green sustainable agricultural practices. But over the decades it has grown to mean something else. To most consumers organic now means: no pesticides, no chemicals - safe. And this is important. People need terms that mean something, and some words should truly be public property. Organic is one of them. We have full lives, and everybody shouldn’t have to be a chemist to understand a body care product ingredient panel. Natural used to mean something, but it has been so over marketed and watered down its meaning is almost useless today. To me, organic means: simple, safe and high quality - something you can trust.

Green is different than organic. Organic can be green, but it’s not the same. A perfectly organic product can be packed in plastic and because of this, falls short of being green. Green doesn’t have to be organic - think lightbulbs and windmills. I think a very special place is where green and organic come together. It’s that radiant place where a product reaches ultimate quality and becomes an archetype. This is the place Organic Essence is trying to demonstrate for body care.

When you physically see the mountains of plastic that most consumer goods companies use to package their products, the scale is breathtaking. It is said that only 20% ever gets recycled, so that means 80% will soon be trash.

I think that perhaps one of the biggest services for people I can provide is clearly communicating the true cost of plastic. There is no way to sugar coat this because the concept of indirect cost cuts across the grain of our desires. Accepting my personal responsibility has been unsettling.

When we buy anything that has an indirect cost on others, we are enjoying an artificially low price. And wheter we realize it or not, it’s theft. Take gasoline for example. I get the benefit of relatively inexpensive travel, somebody else gets to breathe the smog, hear the noise, and maybe the planet gets a tiny-bit warmer. We personally can’t pay the actual true price of gas. How can I compensate you for breathing my smog and enduring a little more noise? The same goes with plastic; it can persist for a million years, it leaches hormone mimicking chemicals that disrupt life, and animals eat it.

This has special meaning for me because last year an adolescent whale washed up on our local beach that had starved to death with a stomach full of plastic. It was so heart rending, we knew we had to do something about the plastic containers we were using. We can’t wait for big business to wake up. We need to replace plastic with things like the biodegradable jar and the eco tube that can be a part of life, rather than a hazard to it. For me, that whale is a symbol of choking on plastic. The way I see it, if humanity wants to stick around, we don’t have a choice.

The biodegradable jar came about as the result of a deliberate process. We searched the ‘packaging world’ which makes a lot of green claims, but when it comes down to it, doesn’t have much to offer. Quite disappointing; but paper tubes, like the kind oatmeal comes in, became our inspiration. From this starting point, a grease-proof biodegradable film was added and the physical structure flowed quite naturally, almost automatically into the form the jar now has.

The label became the next challenge. Most of the labels in our lives are self-adhesive and are varnished or have a glossy plastic layer on top. Labels for body care products also have to be sturdy enough to last the life of the product. We thought; “A label that has to be peeled off before composting or recycling the jar completely misses the point.” So we set out to develop a biodegradable glue that could also double as a durable glaze. What we came up with is so natural, it actually could meed USDA organic standards. The whale could actually eat it and get nutritional value. 100% recycled paper and pure soy ink completes the picture.

The biodegradeable jar is a demonstration of what authentic green looks like. We publically gave this design to the public domain for all people to use to lighten our collective footprint. People from all over the world have contacted me inquiring about it. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. It will take a few years for this design to become common on store shelves because industry has to gear up to mass produce them. Production lines will be set up. Some day this jar will become less expensive to produce than plastic, and at that point it will become ubiquitous.

Late last October, the eco tube was perceived in a dream. We had been focused on following the jar up with a container for lip balm, but the jar process was getting complicated and unworkable for something so small. One morning a dream came and we had a prototype within hours. This design uses only paper and organic glue for its structure and style. I’m still struck with its cool factor. Its simple, it works and its totally biodegradable. It’s the shape of many things to come. Needless to say, we are all enthusiasts and encourage people to ‘follow your dreams’.

I see this eco packaging as a love letter to the Earth.

This is a dream come true.