Interview with Preserve Founder

Borrowed from The Living Principles.

Good Stuff: An Interview with Preserve Founder Eric Hudson

by Claire Lui on Wednesday, July 7, 2010 in Features

In 1996, Eric Hudson noticed that though a lot of plastics were being recycled, there was a dearth of actual products being made from the recycled material. He came up with the Preserve toothbrush, made entirely from recycled #5 plastic, and it became the first of the company’s products to emphasize a lifecycle of entirely recycled materials, from start to finish.

Number 5 plastic—the stuff used to make water filter cartridges and containers for yogurt, hummus, and take-out—can often be hard to recycle. Many communities don’t accept it for recycling, and those that do often end up burning it with less valuable plastic for energy. So Hudson and Preserve knew that part of their environmental responsibility was not only to create recycled products, but to make it easy for people to re-recycle their toothbrushes and other products once they were done with them. So they started Gimme 5—the company set up recycling bins just for #5 plastic in Whole Foods supermarkets across the country (and a few additional selected food co-ops) and encouraged customers who were unable to make it to a Whole Foods to mail back Preserve products back to the company.

Now, Preserve has made it even easier for customers to recycle their toothbrushes, the company’s first and signature products, with the introduction of their mail-back pack. Each toothbrush’s display packaging also serves as a pre-addressed mailer. When the user is done with the toothbrush, he or she can slip it back into its original package and drop it in the mailbox. The first 250,000 toothbrushes will have the postage pre-paid, and afterward, each package just requires a first-class stamp. The returned toothbrushes will be re-recycled into new plastic benches and picnic tables.

We got in touch with Preserve founder Eric Hudson to ask a few questions about the challenges of making products that live up to the “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra.

What are some of the surprises you’ve encountered in creating an environmentally friendly product from start to finish?

An environmentally friendly product is more than just a product, it’s a product system. It’s more than the toothbrush in your hand, it’s about how that toothbrush got to your hand, how it is manufactured, and what you do with it after you’re done with it. Because of the complexity of these product systems, we often encounter the Law of Unintended Consequences. A classic example of this is when someone buys a hybrid car, feels less guilty about driving it, and so drives more miles than normal, effectively canceling out any environmental gain from buying the hybrid car.

We recently encountered this in the new Mail Back Pack for the Preserve toothbrush. By greatly decreasing the amount of material in the primary package (the bag packaging itself), we needed to create a sturdy secondary package (a paperboard box that encloses six of the Mail Back Packs) which adds environmental impact to the system that we had not factored in to our design process. For the next design revision of the Mail Back Pack, we plan to eliminate this secondary package by addressing the sturdiness issue in the primary package.

What is the biggest challenge you face in making truly sustainable design?

Sustainable design isn’t simple—it’s incredibly complex. One of Preserve’s underlying sustainable design principles is to consider the entire system during the design process. Once you understand how all the different pieces of a system connect to each other, you can create a solution that effectively addresses all of a system’s needs with as little environmental impact as possible.

For example, consider the new Mail Back Pack for the Preserve toothbrush. On the bag itself, there is a printed mailing label that is pre-paid and pre-addressed. We initially considered a lot of design ideas that served the same purpose, but were more complex and environmentally impactful, such as a roll-out mailer label. However, the environmental impact of that additional packaging material on each package must be considered in conjunction with understanding how making the recycling process easier will increase the overall recycling rate of the toothbrush. In the end, we decided upon a design that was clean and simple, with minimal environmental impact, at the cost of packaging real estate to talk about the product.

How do you plan to improve the environmental impact of your products in the future?

The desire to make great environment friendly products never stops. As Preserve grows, we’ve thought deeply about creating regional production and supply chains to decrease the environmental footprint of transportation in our supply chain. A toothbrush made from yogurt cups is great, but a toothbrush made from yogurt cups that were sourced locally is even better.