behind the bottle
designing green products
agents of environmental change
Method was founded on the vision that business could be an agent of positive change and a source of solutions to social and environmental problems. The first step of this vision is the responsibility to ensure that our products truly strive for sustainability — from the safety of the materials they are made from, to the ways they are made and shipped, to the partners we work with in our supply chain.
The flipside of this responsibility, though, is the amazing opportunity to design and make the greenest cleaning products available. Our challenge is to make sure that every product we send out into the world truly is a little agent of environmental change. Little green soldiers in the battle of doing-well-by-doing-good, if you will. We love to solve the technical riddles of making great cleaning products using green chemistry, user-centered design and smart engineering, with our ultimate goal of brilliantly functional products that delight users and embody comprehensive sustainability.
Designing products for true sustainability requires a realistically broad definition, not just focusing on a single factor like carbon footprint, natural origin, or safety. When designing products, we consider all of the factors below:
The frequent over-use of the term 'natural' is a good example of the narrow focus on only one dimension of sustainability. Using natural ingredients is an important element of sustainable production, since they are renewable. But it's not enough to stop there - as Dr. Michael Braungart frequently reminds us, the worlds most toxic substances are natural. That's why at method, we use natural as a starting point, and then measure all the other factors that make an ingredient a more sustainable choice. Our material scorecards (completed by Dr Braungart's team at EPEA) assess all aspects of a material's sustainability so we can truly make fully informed choices when selecting the greenest materials.
Pursuing true sustainability also means we must also consider how that product is packaged, and how it's made. More sustainable packaging means designing bottles that have a past and a future; bottles that used to be bottles and will be bottles again. That's why we pioneered the first 100% PCR custom PET bottle in the industry, and why we continue to use 100% recycled plastic to make our bottles. It's also why we minimize the mass of plastic used in each design. It's why we created the first recyclable flat-pack film. So you can be assured that you method bottle is not only the most beautiful, but also the greenest bottle in the house.
