The nitty gritty, the down and dirty, the stuff you've always wondered about... it's all here.

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 reused. 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 (Environmental Protection and Encouragement Agency) 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," and "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