There’s news today that the Pacific Garbage Patch (those billions of pieces of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean) is getting ever bigger. Scientists from the Scripps Institute of Oceanography trawled the waters off California and found a hundred fold increase in plastic over the last 40 years.

This mirrors our growing addiction to plastic - or more particularly our addiction to throwing the stuff away. Plastic’s longevity (by some estimates it takes 500 years to break down) is the problem here. We treat something as disposable that will last for generations.

The solution to this mess lies with us, and the way we behave. I don’t believe just saying “don’t throw plastic away” works, at least not on a global level. A new way of buying products needs to evolve, where the keeping of plastic containers is indivisible from great value and convenience. I believe that’s what we’ve achieved with Splosh.com.

And it’s coming very soon now…..

There’s a growing mood that something must be done about the excess plastic waste on our planet - and in particular in our oceans. So it’s good to see the launch of the The Plastic Disclosure Project, a Hong Kong based initiative that aims to initiate the success of the Carbon Disclose Project.

Essentially the aim is to ask companies how much plastic they are using and, once plastic usage is measured, to try and do something about it. We welcome initiatives like this - plastic waste is a global problem and it needs to be addressed fast.

Splosh.com will be the first company that promotes a 95% reduction in plastic usage - using a system that’s better value and more convenient than anything you can find at a supermarket. We’ll make sure we disclose our plastic usage at every opportunity.

Economic growth is a worthy objective for our modern societies. But at what cost? The problem with simply measuring economic growth is that the hidden costs - such as pollution and wasting of irreplaceable resources - are not calculated.

But that may be set to change. A recent report has attempted the (almost impossible) task of costing our degredation of the planet. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb), published by the United Nations, estimates the cost of human damage to the planet at between $2tn and $4.5tn - and that’s just in one year (2008).

At Splosh.com we believe that a business should account for it’s damage to the environment. And, with an existing brand which has being manufacturing products like laundry detergent for many years, the results may be uncomfortable.

New business models are set to emerge.  It’s perfectly possible to make a profit without damaging the planet - but we may need to do things very differently in future.

What’s in a logo? Everything. It’s the summation of your brand, of all you stand for, distilled into something less than an inch long. As such it’s the ultimate design challenge. It should look effortless, and just plain “right”, but the design process can take many months.

We know our bottles have to be much more than beautiful. They have to be perfectly functional too - so they do a great job for you in the home. But they also need to last, for many years. Among home cleaning and laundry bottles this is a radical idea. But it is, we sincerely believe, a sensible one. 

And now, painstakingly, the designs are emerging. Bottle prototypes have been tested; tools for manufacture are being made and we’ve even decided on the print colours. In a few weeks, when Splosh.com launches, we hope you find our bottles so stunning that you never want to throw them away. 

Piles of needless landfill aren’t the only problem with home care packaging. Excess CO2 emissions are another major issue facing the industry.

What’s in a bottle of kitchen cleaner liquid? Water for the most part - in fact some home cleaning products are about 95% water. The remaining 5% is the bit that does the cleaning. 

This means that lorries are needlessly carrying water around the country - the same stuff that comes out of our taps. 

It causes enormous CO2 emissions - in the case of a kitchen cleaner liquid, twenty times more than necessary. 

At Splosh.com, we think that’s crazy - and we have a solution that will bring down transport  CO2 emissions by up to 95%. 

Keep watching.

Recycling is probably the most widespread way we demonstrate our care for the environment. If we separate our waste, all the packaging with the recycling logo on can be remade into new products. This means we can make a real contribution to saving resources and helping the planet.

Here are the facts. In the UK we produce around 4.5 million tonnes of plastic waste a year, of which 550,000 tonnes are household plastic bottles - that’s about 1.3 billion bottles. The recycling rate of these bottles is much improved in recent years, but it’s still just 40%. 

Of these it’s estimated that 23% are unsuitable for recycling and, of the rest, 75% are sent abroad for recycling - typically to China. So just 42,000 tonnes of household plastic bottles are recycled in the UK each year - less than 1% of the total.

Whilst recycling is better for the environment than throwing a plastic bottle into landfill, it’s not significantly better. And if we want to seriously cut our CO2 emissions and reduce landfill, I would argue it’s not a solution at all.

I should point out that some materials are much more efficient to recycle than others. For example, aluminium is highly efficient. But what about those plastic bottles used for our home cleaning and laundry products?

Sadly these are a different story, as they can’t be re-made into new plastic home care bottles. This is because they suffer from ‘taint’ (it’s hard to remove traces of the previous product in the bottles) and therefore have to be ‘down-cycled’ into other products, like traffic cones or fleeces. Ultimately these products all end up in landfill. 

 When you see home care products in bottles made from ‘recycled material’, this is typically from bottles that once held drinks like milk or ‘pre-consumer regrind’ (plastic that never left the factory). 

Recycling plastic home-care bottles was a start, but now Splosh.com have found a solution that’s way better for the environment.

Here’s the first problem with the way supermarkets sell home care products. We throw away the plastic bottles they come in - after they’ve been used just once. 

In many ways plastic is the perfect material to hold products like laundry liquid, washing up liquid and surface cleaners. It’s light, cheap and allows for a huge variety of designs. 

But if it’s so good, why do we throw away bottles after use? Looked after properly, these bottles might last for years. 

The answer lies in the supermarkets’ distribution model. They need products in easy to handle packaging, that’s also light and robust. It makes much more commercial sense for them to resell a product in the same packaging rather than getting involved in any refilling solution.

A few supermarkets have tried refilling stations - but they haven’t caught on. Imagine having to clean your washing up liquid bottle, then bring it into a supermarket, use a (probably time-consuming and slightly messy) refilling mechanism. It’s never going to appeal to the majoity of consumers when the alternative is just to pick a bottle of the shelf.

So, until the launch of Splosh.com, we’re stuck with a wasteful system where we throw millions of plastic bottles away every year.

So is recycling the solution?