Buoy sources its recycled plastic from Envision, a leader in plastic recycling and the company that invented OceanBound plastic. 

In 2017, Envision Plastics launched OceanBound Plastic, having partnered with local communities in at-risk areas around the world to recover the plastic before it enters the ocean. OceanBound plastic is defined as plastic collected within 50 kilometers of a coastline in an area that does not have good waste management. So a plastic bottle collected in Santa Monica, California is not OceanBound, because it exists in a place with good waste management. The chances of it getting into the ocean are low. If you are in the Dominican Republic, where there is not good waste management, there is a certain chance that such waste will get into the ocean, so the collection helps and it’s designated OceanBound. 

Buoy’s mission is to make items out of recycled plastics that have the highest positive impact on the world. Our system and supply chain are carefully onstructed to make that impact: 

1.   We buy plastic from developed countries that would not otherwise do the ollection. 

2.   The collection is done by local ompanies, so this encourages business activity, creates jobs and pumps money into a developing economy: win, win, win. 

3.   The cleaning and processing are done in the US, where we have the technology and knowhow to do it properly.

4.   The injection molding is done in the US at a plant using solar power, so our energy footprint is very low. 

5.   The supply chain is very short, so our transportation impact is very low. 

6.   Per Buoy’s LCA, if you credit us with the carbon of the plastic collected, each ottle is carbon negative. 

We buy a line of recycled HDPE called EcoPrime made in Envision’s Chino plant. They take the hard plastic bales, then sort by density, then send it through a color-based sorting process, where they separate the natural HDPE that was formerly milk bottles, juice bottles, horchata bottles, etc. After that, it’s cleaned with a process demonstrated to remove a wide range of toxins, just in case it was exposed to something before collection. Finally, it goes through a patented deodorization process. This will get out the cinnemaldehyde from all the horchata bottles. 

Plastic is a miraculous material that makes a great deal of modern life possible at all or affordable. Plastic food packaging, in specific, makes food available and affordable for people all over the world. This is a good thing. The problem in the aftermath is uncollected waste. When plastic waste goes ncollected it remains in nature to break down. (And it does break down, even if slowly.) By buying the waste, Buoy funds the entire collection in the areas of service. Plastic allows Buoy to make a light-weight bottle that imparts no metal taste to water and it allows us to make it the US, 

The blues are carbons, so that’s a long carbon backbone and the reds are ydrogens. This is more or less what a carbohydrate like cellulose looks like except every other hydrogen would be an OH. So knowing as you do that cellulose is not toxic, it’s intuitive that HDPE is not toxic. Without the OH, HDPE can’t be digested easily, certainly not by humans who can’t even digest cellulose, so this makes it resistant to decay, which is what you want in a plastic. Anti-petroleum and anti-growth activists and activist journalists are stretching the work toxic far beyond the breaking point when they say over and over that plastic is toxic. 

Buoy plastic looks like this: 

BisPhenol-A is not used to make HDPE or most plastics for that matter. It’s not needed, so it’s not added. So, no, it would not be in our plastic. I’ve linked to a statement by Envision about this. Despite the fact that our bottles don’t have any BPA in them, we is like making the BPA-free claimbecause we consider it to be misinformation, inasmuch as it makes it seem that we at Buoy think BPA is harmful to humans or animals, which we do not. 

In a hyper-sensitive test, BPA was observed to interact with estrogen receptors in a cell tissue culture, not in an animal or a human. Even though the effect can’t be replicated in animals or humans, people spread the worry that “endocrine disruptors” would turn boys into girls, etc. The insult soy-boy was born from the idea that soy isoflavones would also turn boys into girls, because it also interacts with estrogen receptors in that same test. Since then, vegetarians and vegans have worked hard to market the fact that soy isoflavones don’t cause harm. BPA doesn’t cause harm either, but it doesn’t have a lobbying group as effective as vegetarians and vegans. Plus, the natural fallacy has put a halo over soy that people have accepted. Truth is, when natural estrogens are available in your system, they knock off any super-weak contender for the estrogen receptor like Mike Tyson boxing a five-year-old. To really interfere with hormones, which we do with birth control pills or puberty blockers, the doses have to be staggeringly high to overwhelm the natural hormones circulating in a natural system. The idea that tiny amounts of a molecule could do any mischief is undemonstrated and fantastical, either for soy isoflavones or for BPA. The FDA has not banned BPA from being a food contact additive, despite many write-in campaigns, because there is no evidence that it causes harm and they are scientific not fear-based, in their approach. If you want to take a deep dive into the topic of endocrine disruption, spoiler alert, it’s almost all nonsense fear-mongering, here’s a podcast where Jen Novakacich interviews Chris Borgert, a toxicologist and researcher in the space.