Washing-up Liquid Bottle Made from Ocean Plastic Aims to Clean up Seas
Rebecca Smithers, The Guardian
Published on 17 May 2014
The world’s first washing-up liquid bottle made from reclaimed ocean plastic is to go on sale in UK supermarkets later this month.
The green cleaning brand Ecover will use the launch of its new Ocean Bottle washing-up liquid to highlight the long-term dangers of dumping plastic in the sea, which is killing fish on a large scale and threatening global ecosystems.
Ecover, a Belgian company, has been working with manufacturer Logoplaste to combine plastic trawled from the sea with a plastic made from sugarcane (which it calls Plant-astic) and recycled plastic, in what it is hailing as a world-first for packaging.
In the initial trial, 10% of the plastic in the new bottle will have been retrieved from the sea, although Ecover is keen to gradually increase that proportion. Plastic can take thousands of years to degrade through the combination of salty seawater and the sun. The variable quality of plastic retrieved from the sea and analysed by Ecover’s scientists meant it had to be blended with other recycled plastic material to make it robust enough for a household cleaning product.