I am starting a business, Plaine Products, but for me it’s not about the selling, it’s about the mission. It starts with all natural shampoo, conditioner and body wash in bottles that can be returned and refilled. Who knows where it will end?

Why start Plaine Products and take on plastic as an issue? Did you know that every piece of plastic that has ever been made still exists? Take a second and think about that. How many plastic bottles, containers, toys, bowls, utensils, cups, you can see where from you sit? In my house it was a lot. I think you’ll find that once you start to notice it, you’ll see plastic everywhere you look. And the more you notice it, the more you’ll realize most of it is single use. As in you use it once and you throw it away. Such a waste for a material designed to last forever.

I can’t stand waste and I can’t stand seeing a problem without trying to find a solution. And, unlike so many of the problems we face these days, there is a simple solution to the plastic problem – stop using so much of it. We make a choice every time we buy something, we support single use plastic or we don’t. I decided to try and use less plastic, especially single use plastic,  and while I was at it, make it easier for others to do the same by offering bottles that can be returned and reused.

So why start with shampoo? Lots of people are working on single use water bottles, a major source of plastic waste, but not many people are trying to change what’s in our bathrooms. In most of our lives the shower is an area full of single use plastic. I contemplated my bottles every time I stood in the hot water. Such short lives for bottles that would last for thousands of years. And the seed that would turn into Plaine Products was planted.

While I know that changing our plastic lives one bottle at a time is a small step, we have to start somewhere. We picked a starfish for the Plaine Product’s logo for lots of reasons, but this story is one of them:

     A man is walking along a beach on which thousands of starfish have washed ashore. Further along he sees a young woman picking up one starfish after another and tossing each one gently into the ocean. “Why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?,” he asks.
     “Because the sun is up and the tide is going out and if I don’t throw them further in they will die.”
     “You can’t possibly save them all, you can’t even save one-tenth of them. In fact, even if you work all day, your efforts won’t make any difference.”
     The young woman listened calmly and then bent down to pick up another starfish and threw it into the sea. “It made a difference to that one.”                                   — by Loren Eiseley

Small Can be Big

I once believed that to make a difference you had to do something BIG. But notice earlier I said I’m going to use less plastic and focus on less single use plastic specifically. I didn’t say no plastic, that’s a mountain i’m not ready to climb. It’s good to do BIG, but as life has rolled along I’ve decided that doing something, even if it seems small, is better than doing nothing at all.

So I’m starting with less single use plastic. Not only does it make me feel more hopeful and optimistic, which is no small thing, but when done in concert with others, small can start to add up.

While right now Plaine Products only does small things, keeping a bottle of shampoo, conditioner or body wash out of a landfill, or an ocean, as more people get on board I hope that it will start to get BIG. I also hope that it will make others feel good about taking responsibility for creating less waste in the world. Maybe that will lead them down other roads, maybe it won’t. But it’s still a good thing. And some days a little bit of a good thing can be enough.

I hope you’ll try Plaine Products. Our shampoo, conditioner and body wash are some of the finest, safest, highest quality out there. And, if you’d made it this far, we have a treat for you. Everyone who signs up for email updates on our homepage will get a special low introductory offer, so take a minute, visit our homepage www.PlaineProducts.com and we’ll make it worth your time!

Lindsey McCoy
Co Founder