The Body Shop is making plastic packaging out of air pollution.
It plans to extract harmful greenhouse gases from the atmosphere to make containers and bottle lids for its range of body butters.
By 2020, the new scheme should have reduced the amount of plastics made from oil by 70 per cent.
How does it work?
The company which makes the new plastic, called Newlight Technologies, collects methane from farms and natural gas refineries.
Staff put the gas into a reactor with enzymes to absorb the carbon and oxygen, rearranging the particles into a solid material known as ‘Air Carbon’, the Huffington Post reported.
This can be melted down and dried to make pellets which can be shaped into containers – for example, for the moisturising body butters we love.
Founded by Anita Roddick in 1976, the Body Shop been known for its eco-friendly principles, coming out against animal testing early on and encouraging people to bring their bottles back for a refill to reduce waste.
This video explains how the new technology works:
At the moment, most plastic is made from crude oil that hasn’t been used before.
The new method would use methane, a waste product which is more harmful to the atmosphere than C02 when the same amounts are compared.
Once the products are on sale, people should eventually be able to bring them back for a refill rather than continually buying more.
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