We'd ask this series of questions that we always ask about all of our material, and they wouldn't know the answers because they have suppliers who have suppliers who have suppliers. And they actually hadn't asked all those questions. So very early on in the development of Method, we were doing a lot of that digging up of information through our suppliers. And if you can imagine that we have a relationship with our direct supplier, but we don't have a relationship with their supplier. It's a pretty laborious and tedious process to kind of go to that level of depth. But in my opinion, you can't truly achieve greener design in a product without that type of blue collar, roll up your sleeves sustainability work without going to that level of depth.

JB: Have you had to convince them to say, “Yes, please find this out?" Have there been any who said, “Too much work?"

AL: Well, sure. There have been some that have said, “That's too much work,” or, “We don't want to do that,” or in some cases they say, “Sure, we'll do it,” and then it just never gets done. And those are suppliers that we've chosen not to work with, because this is something that as I just said, it's critically important to creating a green design to be able to take those materials and trace them all the way back and all the way across their lifecycle. And if you can't do that, you're faking it. You're faking it.

And so we need to work with suppliers since we don't make raw materials, we don't grow coconuts. We need to work people that have that level of transparency, have the willingness and the eagerness to go and birddog that information that we're looking for.

And the reward then for them is to work with one of the most innovative companies in home care that's really leading the way from an innovation standpoint that allows them to develop new markets. We try to create that type of symbiotic relationship so that there's something that we can give back to our suppliers for the extra level of depth that we're asking them to go to to work with us.

JB: And on a similar note to changes in ingredients, have you made any major packaging changes over the years? I know that in the past couple of years you started using 100 percent recycled content plastic bottles.

AL: Sure. So the answer overall is yes, we've done tons and tons in the packaging world. One of the biggest ones has been what you just mentioned, which is 100 percent recycled content, which is actually really difficult to do in clear plastic and PET. And it's difficult because recycled material generally isn't clear. It's kind of dirty from the recycling process, and it also has some integrity problems with the package itself.

And given that the design aesthetic is so critical to the Method brand experience, product experience, we needed to find a way to work with our suppliers to get very clean recycled PET so that we could bring it all way up to 100 percent. And the reason that that's important for us is we have an axiom at Method, which is we believe in reincarnation, we want every Method package to have a past and a future. And I challenge my packaging team, I want to know what was this bottle before it was a bottle, and what will it be when it's no longer a bottle. And 100 percent PET allows us to get there.

Now that's just one example. I'll give you two other quick ones. We're making our wipes packaging out of what's known as a flow wrap film. Think of a potato chip bag. And potato chips bags are not recyclable because they're multilayer materials that are sort of laminated together. You can't separate them. And that was something that we just weren't happy with. Sure, you're using less plastic, so to speak, than a canister, but the fact that it wasn't recyclable means that I couldn't answer that question that I ask my packaging team: What will it be when it's no longer this package? We actually partnered with our film supplier and we developed the world's first recyclable flow wrap film.

And then I would just mention the last one. One of the big innovations that's happened during the course of the last nine years, the history of Method, is the advent of biopolymers. And biopolymers is a very controversial topic because there's not generally end of life scenarios for biopolymers that are really great, meaning there's no recycling for them, and the composting that is available must be done on an industrial basis, so you can't do it in your backyard.

And so what we've done is we've actually experimented and brought biopolymers to Method in areas where that makes sense. Like for example, we did a wipe material - the actual wipe material that's normally thrown in the trash - we did that out of 100 percent biopolymer a few years ago in our Omop product. There's another example of bringing material innovation to the packaging.

JB: And you mentioned aesthetics, and that was going to be one of my questions: When you're making changes to either ingredients or the packaging, how does the issue of the product performance and the appearance affect these kinds of decisions?

AL: Well, product performance is non-negotiable. We will not launch a product unless it works absolutely as good as or better than the mainstream brands, not the green brands, but the mainstream ones. So I'm talking about the traditional stuff that is sometimes toxic and the things that we worry about. We've got to work that good or better.

The reason that our toilet bowl cleaner is only a year and a half old is for that reason. I struggled for eight years to find a green chemistry that work as well as the glycolic acid and phosphoric acids and things that people are using in toilet bowl cleaners, and failed. And then only when I did find a solution to that did we launch the product. So it starts and ends with product performance. This stuff has got to work. And we made sure that it does.

On a design aesthetic standpoint, these are products that are very neglected from a design standpoint. And if you're going to have a dish soap that sits out on your countertop for 23 hours and 45 minutes every day and you use it for the other 15, why not make it an object that's pleasurable to look at, that creates a little bit of delight? If you're going to have an air care product sitting out or something that plugs into the wall, why not make it look like something you'd actually want to have in your home?