Method, the company that used green chemistry to turn age-old concepts for making and marketing soap on their head, has come up with another innovation that explodes a long-held idea — that the trash trapped in the North Pacific Gyre is unredeemable. Working with Envision Plastics in Southern California, Method came up with a model for collecting and upcycling some of the debris that’s swirling in the currents of the gyre, a swath of ocean covering 20 million square kilometers. By some estimates, the amount of plastic awash in the ocean is twice the size of Texas and in some areas the ratio of plastic to plankton is now 10 parts of plastic to 1 part of plankton, according to Jared Blumenfeld, the head of the EPA in the Pacific Southwest. “We asked ourselves, ‘What if we could take some of the plastic that’s floating in the North Pacific Gyre and make bottles out of it?,’ ” said Adam Lowry, who founded Method 10 years ago with business partner Eric Ryan. “Well, we did it.” Read entire story here. Source: GreenBiz.com By Leslie Guevarra