Plantioxidants Mail-back Program: Cherish Your Body and Take Care of the Planet

by Plantioxidants ® May 07, 2018

Plantioxidants is More Than Great Formulas

For this blog post, we are shifting gears a little bit. We are confident and proud of the abundance of antioxidants in all Plantioxidants products. And by self-regulating to ensure our formulas are clean according to USDA organic certification standards, we know we are providing you with the healthiest ingredients and formulas possible. If you follow us on social media or regularly read our blog posts, you are constantly learning about what makes our formulas unique, efficacious, clean, and important for your health; however, what you may not think about because it is fairly obvious is that when you buy a Plantioxidants product and our amazing formulas, you are also getting a bottle, an outerbox, the shipping box, etc. We've put a lot of thought into those for a purpose.

The most important part of any product is the entire product. ~Josh Wadinski, Founder and CEO

For that reason, we are dedicating today’s post to the green beauty pillar of Plantioxidants (i.e. anything that isn’t the formula) and our newest solution to help all of our consumers practice a more sustainable lifestyle when it comes to product purchases. We feel guilty when we purchase products just to throw them away, especially if they come from single-use materials (e.g. plastic straws, to-go coffee cups, etc.). Plantioxidants is founded on the idea of #guiltfreebeauty. This means that not only are we providing you with the healthiest formulas possible, but we are also offering them to you in a way that makes it easy to “take care of the planet and others” without feeling the guilt of being wasteful.

How Plantioxidants Takes Care of the Planet

This past April was a very important month, not just for us at Plantioxidants, but for everyone living on this big beautiful rock. It was a chance to think about our role as consumers and provide solutions on how we can make changes that positively impact the Earth. In case you missed it, here are a few highlights about how we celebrated Earth Month:

In support of other companies that focus on closed loop, we sold Plantioxidants at BaYou with Love, an eco-friendly brand and retail platform run by actress and activist Nikki Reed and business partner Morgan Bogle. They recently collaborated with Dell to launch a beautiful line of jewelry that uses non-virgin gold from old computers.

We were announced as a finalist for the CEW Sustainability Excellence Award. This is extremely humbling considering we only launched in late 2017!

100% of our Earth Day sales were donated to help empower organizations that are driving education on the impacts of climate change (50% of total sales went to “Years of Living”) and organizations driving action to curb climate change (the other 50% went to Kiss the Ground for their soil conservation efforts).

We continued to educate on how Plantioxidants as a company is sustainably focused through our 100% post-consumer recycled bottles and recycled boxes to the environmental soy inks and our biodegradable shipping boxes with vegetable-based adhesives. Our facilities are solar-powered, shipping relies on hybrid vehicles, and the majority of our ingredients are domestically sourced, which helps cut down on carbon emissions from transportation.

Overall, our goal was to show Mother Earth how much we care, and this doesn’t stop at the end of April. By donating 1% of our annual sales to 1% For The Planet, we are helping to take care of the planet all year-round. We are constantly revising and continuously working towards being as sustainable as possible in every way at the company, so we are thrilled to share with you yet another way you can celebrate our beloved Earth the other 364 days of the year.

How You Can Take Care of the Planet

Another great way we are ensuring our impact extends beyond one day or one month each year is through our mail-back program, which also rolled out in April. We started our mail-back program to account for a very upsetting reality. Currently, about 30% of all recyclables (including glass, metal, and plastic) are actually recycled. When we started Plantioxidants, we set out to be a zero-waste company where little to nothing was wasted and we instilled cradle-to-cradle design in everything. Zero-waste is a goal and a process because, much like being sustainable, it requires daily routines and rituals, just like your skincare. The goal is to leave no, or at least as little, waste as possible while at the same time instilling design and processes that consider the entire lifecycle of both our products and our processes (cradle-to-cradle).

We will explain zero-waste and cradle-to-cradle design in more detail in an upcoming blog post. For now, here’s everything you need to know about our mail-back program:

Plantioxidants Mail-back Program

Step 1: Use it all up! First, soak up all of the Plantioxidants goodness you have. Once it is empty, don’t throw it away just yet!

Step 2: Order a re-fill! Once you order a new product, our systems let us know if you have previously purchased one and will automatically include you in the mail-back program.

Step 3: Let us do some work! After you place your new order, we will send your new product in our 100% biodegradable shipping box.

Step 4: Out with the new, in with the old! The ball is back in your court and all you have to do is take out your new product and the return mailing label we included and add your old, empty bottles.

Step 5: Mail it back! Use the new, pre-paid return label and apply it over the old label on the exact same box we sent you. Make sure to place it over the previous label and tape it over the opened edges. Then mail it back to us with the carrier we sent to you.

Step 6: Accept our thanks! Once we get the old product you used up, we will send you a code for 10% off of your next purchase. It’s our way of saying, “thank you for helping to take care of the planet.”

Step 7: Cherish your body!From there, just keep on being you and taking care of that beautiful face of yours. Once you’re ready, repeat the process!

A Plastic-free Future

With the Plantioxidants mail-back program, everyone wins. After many calculations and considerations, we decided to go with 100% post-consumer recycled plastic instead of several other options simply due to the responsibility we have as a company to help clean up the environment. We don’t need to use alternative forms of packaging until we use up the excessive amount of wasted plastic that already exists on our planet. In an ideal world, other companies will adopt this strategy and we will all use 100% non-virgin materials and downcycle them until we don’t have waste in the environment. We can then move on to a different packaging material, and after all of those single use, non-virgin materials are removed, we will start looking at new virgin resources. We feel strongly that this mail-back program and your implementation of it is imperative in helping us achieve this goal. And for those wondering about the carbon offsets, if we recycle all of our bottles the carbon footprint is lower than if ~10% are recycled without our mail-back program, and that includes the shipping (which we do with hybrid vehicles).

We will keep you updated about our usage of the plastic, but we are already looking at partnering with a start-up that uses recycled plastic to help build homes for the homeless, working with start-ups that are using recycled plastic in road reconstruction, and (which we feel most excited about) recycling your bottles into future Plantioxidants products. No matter the final use, together we can clean up the planet and extend Earth Day to be honored every day.