Drowning in Plastic — NOT! An Environmentally Positive Local News Snippet...

One of our local friends — Vanessa — is a fellow entrepreneur who has been building her one-person day spa and beauty salon for several years.

At this point, she has become somewhat established and mildly successful, and one of the things that has helped make her so is the line of beauty products she — herself — has created.

This cobalt blue beach glass was once a blue glass bottle...

Mrs. Denmarkguy was visiting her today and they got to talking about the whole "making the world a better place" issue, and they ended up talking about the packaging for Vanessa's products.

She'd apparently cast about to form a partnership/alliance with someone to package them... and kept running into all these "layers of plastic" everyone seemed to have front and center in their product lines. Didn't appeal to her — at all — so she decided to take matters into her own hands... and strike out in a direction not typically associated with beauty products: Instead of plastic containers and "clamshell" presentation... she chose glass.

The Way to Reduce Plastic in the World...

... is to simply not use it.

Vanessa's new line of products are all packaged in glass containers, and she has an additional "gimmick" that actually serves to build brand loyalty: She charges a $2 deposit on every container of product sold... BUT, you get a 10% discount when you bring one of her bottles back in to be refilled.

Or, of course, you can just bring in the bottles/containers and get your $2 back.

More beach glass: This would have been green beer bottles. Now it's going back to being sand...

Back in my early days on Steemit, I wrote a few posts about one of the "things" I had done over the years as a source of income: Picking up beach glass and selling it to jewelry makers and artists around the world, in a form of "upcycling."

One of the things that always appealed to me about being able to do that was that it represented a form of recycling.

We can look at glass in nature and see it as "trash," which admittedly it IS, but it's not a "toxic substance" to the environment, the way plastic is. Glass is basically silica sand, lime, salt and trace minerals... all of which are naturally present in nature. Beach glass, as I would pick it up, was basically partially degrading back into "non-dirty" sand... not really a pollutant.

Somehow, it just made me really happy to hear that Vanessa had chosen the simplest way to combat the "plastic pollutant" issue... to simply not use it all all!

Maybe there's hope for the future of the world, after all!

Thanks for reading!

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(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for Steemit)
Created at 190220 20:22 PST
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