Our Plastic Journey

We don’t need to know what happens to the Scrub Queen after it makes it to your home, but we would love to share the process the recycled plastic has been through before it got there. 

We know we’re not perfect, but we take pride in our products and how they’re produced. Traceability and transparency allow us to be certain that we’re sourcing the best materials and doing so in a way that’s best for our planet. 

So, without further ado, we’d like to share the typical journey our recycled plastic goes through before ending up in your home. 

1. You finish drinking that delicious bottle of organic apple juice and toss it in your recycling bin. 
2. Garbage collection workers collect your bin, along with the other post-consumer recycled plastics from shops and other community members. 
3. All of the recycled plastics are delivered to a collection center to be sorted by material and color. 
4. The plastic materials are compressed or disassembled (to save space during shipping) and are sent to a recycling facility.
5. A process called descaling uses air to remove dust, dirt, and other impurities from the plastic material. 
6. Three to four hours in a high temperature sterilization kills any bacteria or microorganisms—making the plastic material safe to once again re-enter homes around the globe. 
7. Manual (humans) and automatic (infrared machines) sorting allows us to end up with the specific plastic material we need for our products (in most cases, polypropylene, or PP). 
8. The plastic material is then crushed into tiny flakes before once again being washed in a high temperature solution. 
9. The flakes are rinsed and go through a final sorting process before being dried, combined with other essential ingredients, melted into pellets, and sent to our factory. 
10. We transform the pellets back into a liquid, inject it into a mold (think a cookie cutter for plastic), and voila!—we’re left with a solid piece of plastic that can be assembled into one of our products. 

Why is this process something to brag about? Well, we hope that when you see the word “recycled” on our products, you realize that we’re going through all of these steps to keep plastic out of landfills and oceans, and instead give it a second life. We even have the Global Recycling Standard (GRS) logo to back it up.

Through partnerships with organizations like Plastic Bank, we’re also supporting the infrastructure and livelihoods that support communities around the globe while realizing the value of plastic “waste.” 

So, when you’re using our recycled plastic Clean Sweep broom to get rid of dirt and grime around your kitchen table, realize that you’re really cleaning up so much more than that.