Lush Cosmetics Is Now Selling Rubbish In The Best Way Possible

Your favourite bath bomb supplier is turning rubbish into treasure, and we're so here for it.

Lush has never shied away from making a big statement, from encouraging employees to show up to work wearing nothing but an apron to promote its naked products to staging a graphic performance art act demonstrating the ugliness of testing cosmetics on animals.

The company, which prides itself on its environmentally friendly products and packaging, has rolled out a number of campaigns at its stores across the globe to fight against everything from shark fin soup to the Keystone XL Pipeline. Now, Lush is diving into an effort to clean up the ocean by transforming plastic found polluting the water into packaging for its products.

According to Bustle, Lush recently partnered with Ocean Legacy Foundation on its mission to gather 27 tons of plastic from Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. That's right, 27 TONS. In order to help fund the project, Lush pulled money from donations it receives through the purchase of its Charity Pot lotion.

The company then sent the rubbish over to Urban Resource Group, where it will be converted into plastic pellets before being mixed with other rubbish to make recyclable packaging for fan-favourite products like Ocean Salt, Silky Underwear Dusting Powder, and Ro's Argan Body Conditioner.

According to National Geographic, humans dump approximately eight million tons of plastic into the ocean and waterways each year, contributing to the existing five trillion tons of plastic waste currently polluting the ocean. The waste destroys natural habitats and kills roughly 100,000 marine mammals and an appalling one million seabirds every year, according to the Ocean Legacy Foundation's website. If we don't work to eliminate ocean pollution, millions more sea creatures will die, threatening the balance of the ecosystem.

We can only hope that initiatives like Lush's newest campaign will open people's eyes to the avoidable, yet permanent, damage that we're doing to our oceans and inspire new ideas on how to simultaneously cut down on the waste we're producing while also finding ways to repurpose what currently exists.