It wasn’t until Sarah Paiji Yoo became a new mother that her journey into plastic-free living really began.

Specifically, it was the switch to baby formula that changed her worldview. Yoo had been breastfeeding her son for a few months and was looking to transition him to a dissolvable formula in 2018. But she found herself wondering what kind of water to mix it with — bottled or tap.

There were no good options. “I was horrified to learn that regardless of whether you drink tap water or bottled water here in the United States, our water contains hundreds of pieces of microplastics per liter,” she said.

Yoo began connecting the dots, tracing those microplastics — tiny shards of plastic that form from the breakdown of larger plastic items — back to their source. Or rather, their many, many sources. Yoo was soon seeing plastic throughout her life: It held her child’s vitamins, her toothpaste, the ketchup she kept in the fridge. “It’s really everything,” she said.

The next few years would bring a deluge of new and alarming data about plastic’s impact on people and the planet. Scientists began finding microplastics everywhere: in deep ocean trenches, near the tops of remote mountains. In 2019, researchers in Australia estimated that we ingest a credit card’s worth of microplastics every week, with unknown health effects. Other reports documented the ballooning impact of plastic pollution on marine life, as well as plastic production’s growing carbon footprint and disproportionate harms against poor communities of color.

Yoo was determined to do something about it. A self-described serial entrepreneur, she ended a self-imposed break from starting new businesses to co-found Blueland in 2019. The company’s mission is to eliminate unnecessary plastics from familiar cleaning and personal care products like dish soap, toilet bowl cleaner, and body wash — all of which it sells in concentrated tablet form, shipped directly to customers in recyclable paper packaging.

Read the full article about building a zero-waste economy by Joseph Winters at Grist.