At method, we want to be a sustainable business, but we recognize that no business
is sustainable yet. That's why we've geared our company to be the best at getting
better. Our sustainability philosophy starts with our mission to Inspire a Happy,
Healthy Home | Revolution, and centers around using innovation to create positive
change. But mere sustainability is not our goal. We want to go much farther than
that. We want to become restorative and enriching in everything we do so that the
bigger we get, the more good we create. We are striving for sustainable abundance.
Along with Eric, I founded method on the idea that business, as the largest and
most powerful institution on the planet, had the greatest opportunity to create
solutions to our environmental and health crises. Since the dawn of the industrial
age, business has traded off people's health and the state of the planet for growth
and profit, but it doesn't need to be so. In fact, after having spent a number of
years working on environmental issues at the
Carnegie Institution, I was convinced that business is the most powerful
agent for positive change on the planet. But it's not business as we know it today.
It is fundamentally and profoundly different. It is business re-designed.
And so we created a different type of company, that makes a different kind of product,
in a different way. At the core of our business is the
Cradle to Cradle
design philosophy. This philosophy is pretty simple. It says that it's OK to use
high-tech materials, products, and gadgets that make our lives better, we just need
to design products so those materials can be infinitely re-used. At method, we call
that reincarnation. We want every product to have a past and a future. Like bottles
made from old bottles, and non-toxic cleaners that biodegrade instead of toxic chemicals
that don't.
And just to make sure, we work with
Dr. Michael Braungart, renowned environmental chemist and co-author of Cradle
to Cradle, to guide our product development process. In fact Dr. Braungart's team
at EPEA assesses every material
in every method product before we launch it, so we won't bring to market anything
that doesn't meet the Cradle to Cradle standard.
Because designing products with a past and future isn't very easy, we have built
our company around innovation. Innovation = change, because without innovation,
there can be no sustainability. There are a lot of reasons, excuses, to not do something
remarkable or green. "That has never been done before", "the technology doesn't
exist" are common excuses. Innovation means breaking through those barriers to find
solutions. And whether it's the
first compostable wipe, the
first 8X laundry detergent, or the
first recyclable flat-pack film, solutions are
what we do. And the way we achieve sustainability is by using one innovation to
give us license for the next. That way, we move the ball down the field 5 yards
at a time through successive innovations rather than throwing the Hail Mary pass
that never gets caught. It is sustainability achieved through serial innovation.
- adam lowry, chief greenskeeper, co-founder
