Lush: Making Use of Ocean Plastic

Most of us already know how taxing ocean plastic is on our ecosystem. Not only does it hurt the adorable ocean critters we see heart-wrenching photos of, but it completely circles right back around and up into our food chain. Pollution becomes our air, water, and food – stagnating or crippling all life. So, coming up with creative solutions for how to use less of the harmful stuff or reuse it before it becomes a problem is something worth celebrating.

Lush Cosmetics are doing just that. Already a fan of using recycled plastic in their packaging, Lush has taken it just that one step farther by incorporating plastic recovered from beach and ocean clean ups directly into their bottles for reuse. Right now the process works for their dark or clear bottles. As it stands the packaging is not 100% ocean plastic, but they have plans to improve the systems they use to process it even more as time goes on, and using just regular old recycled stuff is still pretty great.

The idea came from being a good neighbor. Both Lush Cosmetics and Ocean Legacy are located in Vancouver Island, British Columbia in Canada. The two groups started to talk about the plastic debris that Ocean Legacy had been collecting all over Pacific North America and their mutual love of nature and animals (Lush is an animal testing free brand) and over time some really cool work was done to bring a few products to market that help support what they’ve been doing.

Right now the products made with ocean plastic are: Dirty Spring Wash Shower Gel, Woosh Shower Jelly, Charity Pot Hand Lotion, and Plum Rain Shower Gel with many more to come.

We hope to see much more like this in the future, not just from Lush, but from all the main retailers of cosmetics. There’s nothing more beautiful than a healthy planet.

Let us know if you agree and what you think of this line in the comments below. 🙂