The Live Lightly Podcast

Jess(00:00)
Welcome back to the Live Lightly podcast. We are here for a second season. I'm your host, Jessica. Thank you so much for joining me. Today we are going to talk to Lindsay McCoy. She is the founder of Plain Products. And when I started my journey of trying to eliminate plastic from my household,

The first layer of my journey was trying to eliminate plastic that came into contact with food or drinks, which took quite a long time. And then I realized that there's a whole nother layer for the environment because we're putting a lot of plastic out there. Plain Products was the very first company that I found to replace my shampoo, conditioner, and lotion.

And so it's really just an honor to be here with you today, Lindsay. I feel like things have come full circle. I saw the plastic detox on Netflix and I thought, my gosh, I just have to start putting together a second season where we focus more on the products that we can use in our homes and the people that we can trust. So thank you for joining me today, Lindsay.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (01:00)
it's always so exciting for me to have the opportunity to talk to people. You know, it's so hard in this busy, busy world to find the time to find good products and have these conversations. So I appreciate the opportunity.

Jess (01:14)
Absolutely, it sounds like you've had quite the journey. You started this business nine years ago, which coincides when I was looking for products to swap out in my home. And like I said, I was looking initially for products to swap out that replaced a plastic throwaway

And along the way I realized, ⁓ my gosh, there's so many more layers to this. There's also the ingredients, which I had done before the plastic. I thought I was doing well with ingredients. But then once I started realizing that some of the swaps that I was getting, not yours, but for other products, how unclean they were, it just really, and I went back to yours to check the ingredients. I was so grateful that I didn't have to start over again.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (02:00)
Beat it!

Jess (02:00)
most

of the products it was like back to the drawing board. And it took me a very long time actually to find replacements for everything because there weren't really any that were doing both at the same time. ⁓ we will talk about that but could you just kind of go back to the beginning and walk us through the journey that you've been on and what sparked this inspiration for you to do such a thing?

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (02:18)
Yeah!

Well, ⁓ when I was growing up, if you wanted to do good in the world, you did not go into business. You did something else with your life. And so I ended up ⁓ going into the nonprofit world. And I worked for a lot of different nonprofits. And then I met and married my husband, who's actually from the Bahamas. And when we moved to the Bahamas, I actually didn't have a big nonprofit background. I had done more women and children and education and that type of.

stuff, but there was a nonprofit there that was looking for an executive director called Friends of the Environment, and I ended up applying and getting the job just on the basis of my general experience. But while I was there, I got to have these amazing experience with scientists who were coming and doing research, and we go out to these beautiful remote islands, and there would be plastic. No people, but plastic. Or we would do these beach cleanups with kids, and there would be piles of plastic, or I would end up at a dump for something, and you just see the plastic piled up.

Jess (03:11)
Gosh.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (03:20)
And it just became so apparent to me in a way that not in the States, all this plastic was just sitting there and it wasn't going anywhere. And that's around the same time that scientists started to say there could be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050 if we just kept throwing stuff away. And so I didn't want to keep contributing to it. So I started carrying the reusable bag and skipping the straw and the water bottle.

and I was staring at these plastic bottles in my shower. And here's when you find out how old I am. I was like, why can't it be like Netflix where like they used to send you a DVD and you watched it then you sent the DVD back and then they sent you another one. I was like, why can't we do that with packaging? And that was the initial idea. And then, so I called my sister, we agreed to start it. I decided to move back to the US. Then I started learning about the ingredients, you know.

was like, okay, we're gonna create this great environmental, I didn't know anything about the beauty industry. And so I started talking to other kind of, I guess you call them influencers now, but sort of green beauty people, like just, what do you think about this? And they're like, my gosh, you can't put this, what about this? What about this? And they're like, no, no. So, I mean, it was a steep learning curve of all the things that I had been putting on my body for...

Jess (04:19)
Mmm.

you

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (04:42)
30, 40 years that I didn't know were bad. you know, mean, at the time, I guess I felt naive. It just never occurred to me that companies would put chemicals in water and a bottle and sell it to people. So, you know, I really started this from the packaging side and wanting to have less plastic in the environment. And then I started to find out that there was plastic in the bottle and endocrine disruptors in the bottle. And so then the ingredients became...

Jess (04:55)
Yeah.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (05:11)
very important to me, you know, because I was like, I don't put this on my kids. I don't want other people or on me. I mean, that's the other crazy thing is, you know, people are like, oh, it's baby safe. I'm like, shouldn't it be everybody safe? Like, you don't want to put this on babies, but I also don't want to, I mean, like, I'm not dead yet. Like, I also need to probably be doing good things for, so ingredients became a real, just learning curve and became very important to me that we were also doing

Jess (05:23)
you

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (05:40)
in clean ingredients in our products. So packaging, ingredients, and then I was like, oh, food. Then you go down the next rabbit hole, as you were talking about, it's the worst. then we started to learn about all the effects that the plastics having on our health and all the other things. So it's been a journey, but it's amazing how when you just are trying not to have waste and you're trying not to have chemicals, you end up

with vegan safe cruelty free products. Like it kind of just, all works together.

Jess (06:17)
Well, that's not the common way that many products out there have done it. I feel like a lot of people jumped on the bandwagon when they started realizing people wanted less plastic and they did it in sneaky ways that seemed clean and green, like, ooh, a bottle that is made of recycled plastic. But inside is still all the chemicals and it's like, wait, but I still have a plastic bottle. Right.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (06:46)
No, I mean,

there has been so much money spent on convincing us that disposability is the most important thing. unfortunately that plastic recycling happens when it very rarely does. And even when plastic is recycled, you know, it's usually melted down and it can only be reused once or twice. And that's a whole lot more chemicals that go into it. And then it still ends up in a landfill. So, you know, there are, there are things.

Jess (06:54)
Hmm.

Yeah, the end of the

day.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (07:15)
is good for, but you know, things that we use for a little bit and then just to throw it away, it just doesn't, it just doesn't make sense. And you know, things that we're eating or putting in our body, it turns out that something made from a toxic chemical, maybe not the best packaging to be putting in.

Jess & Michele (07:34)
Right, yeah, it's not the best packaging. And I think that a lot of people are now starting to be aware of that. But when they start to sift through all of this, Lindsay, can you talk to some of the greenwashing that you see out there when it comes to these type of products in this industry? Because I just mentioned one, but there's more. Yeah.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (07:58)
There's so many. mean, from the

ingredient side, there's this word fragrance that people aren't legally required to say. At some point, some lobbyists convinced the FDA that it should be a trade secret, that they shouldn't have to disclose their fragrance. And then they started using it to hide all manner of things in their products. So I would just say to anyone, if you see the word fragrance and nothing else, you should be asking what's in that. And if the company is not willing to tell you,

That's a pretty good sign that there's probably some things that you don't want on your body in there.

Jess (08:32)
you go a little bit deeper into that because that was probably something that you really had to figure out. that's a big piece to the puzzle. Your stuff smells amazing. But yeah.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (08:37)
Yeah, I mean, and it's essential oils. I mean, they're all plant-based,

so you don't need it. But, you know, if you want some crazy smell that's not, you can't get out of plants, ⁓ you know, people can make it just about anything out of chemicals. I mean, it's actually kind of remarkable what they can do with chemicals, but then that usually often means some other chemicals, often plastics, phthalates.

Jess (08:45)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (09:06)
endocrine disruptors to hold that scent all together and to make it work with the product. And that's all behind this word, fragrance. So people don't have to disclose, but they also can disclose. And if they're using stuff that is not scary, they probably are disclosing. So I think anytime you just see that word, you really got to ask yourself, why aren't they telling you what's in it?

Jess & Michele (09:12)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

that's a huge problem. Um,

Because for performance, I'm sure that shampoo and conditioner have a lot of different layers of chemical ingredient.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (09:42)
They do, but

we were very lucky. you know, I started learning about all of the ingredients that went into a lot of other products. And so we started looking for a manufacturer that made an effective product that was plant-based. that took, it took a long time. Kissed a lot of frogs, got a lot of...

lot of samples, got a lot of ingredient lists or people weren't willing to give us their ingredient lists. And we're like, no, okay. You're all, know, Nope, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that was a lot of phone calls, emails, phone call back. Well, do you know anybody else? Well, can you tell me? Well, what do you think about this? Do you know anybody? How about this? Well, how about these? I mean, just on and on and on.

Jess & Michele (10:10)
How long did that take to finally find a manufacturer that had all those, how long? A year. Wow. And they...

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (10:33)
And then asking questions. And then on top of it, once we did find somebody, we're like, oh, did we mention that we wanted to use these bottles? And they're like, what? So we actually went down when we had a finalist and talked to them. And we went to see their facility and talked about what we wanted to do and what they were doing and were aligned enough that they were willing to work with us. I am.

so grateful. I I don't think I realized at the time how lucky we are that it only took us a year and that we found somebody who felt the same way we felt about ingredients. ⁓ So, you know, we have a hard and fast rule about what we do and don't use. And they were aligned with that, ⁓ which has been amazing. know, we haven't had to, we have had to say in a few cases, like, you know, they're like, can't get this. I'm like, well, we need to figure something else out.

or we're just gonna discontinue. I think it's important to just have some red lines in the sand. I'm like, no, we're disclosing everything.

I want the whole list from you. you can't give me the whole list, don't use that supplier.

we'd all agreed that it was plant-based. And interestingly, the only issue was there was a few scent suppliers who were like, we can't tell you. And I was like, then not that one. Then we're going to use somebody else.

Jess & Michele (11:49)
So, so within that manufacturing process, there are multiple suppliers of ingredients and they deal with that end or you had to deal with that end.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (11:56)
Yes.

I mean,

we dealt with that in and that saying here's our policy, but then they have thankful, I mean, that is, they have a huge staff. They have a chemist on board, they're FDA certified. That's a whole, again, not knowing what we were getting into when we got into the personal care world. I thought, oh, we can make products. No, no, no, no, It's one thing to make stuff.

that you're using in your own home. And I applaud everybody who does that. And that is, a wonderful thing and probably the safest thing that you could do. But if you are making something that has to sit on a shelf for any amount of time, you need somebody who can help you make that stable. You need somebody who's doing the microbial tests. You need somebody that, is FDA certified. You need somebody who can do all of those things to keep everybody safe because

⁓ It just starts to get complicated the second you start you put stuff in a bottle.

Jess & Michele (12:57)
and that's just with the product itself and then with the packaging that's a separate situation altogether. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because I think that that is so important for people to understand what went into figuring out a way to completely bypass the plastic.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (12:59)
Yes.

whole other thing. And that's Yeah.

that was just, that was the goal. That was the whole goal. That was the beginning. I mean, that was the idea. It's like, how do I keep, how do I stop throwing away all this plastic?

Jess & Michele (13:21)
That was the beginning. Yeah.

And it's like, have to go back to what did people, like, did you have to go back to like, how was this done before plastic even existed? I guess people just used a bar of soap or something, right?

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (13:41)
I mean, used to have, they've had these products before plastic. So yes, I mean, they're there. All of this existed. mean, you know, people use glass in a lot of cases. I mean, I, we, I don't think we were alive. I mean, were not alive. mean, plastics really started ramping up in the 40s and 50s. So that's sort of pre us, but

Jess & Michele (13:50)
Hmm, that's interesting because I can't remember back that far

Probably not.

Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (14:08)
I was barely alive when Coke and Pepsi and all that used to come in glass bottles and there was a bottle return. I was not alive for the milk man, but I have heard tell of the milk man would drop off the milk and then he'd pick up the empty bottles. I have read research that said there used to be facilities all over the country that just wash bottles for refilling. For the soda industry, for the milk, that just used to be the way it was.

Jess & Michele (14:21)
Thank

way it was.

Yeah, that all went away.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (14:38)
until plastic.

It all went away because plastic was cheap.

Jess & Michele (14:42)
it's very sad how there was never any safety testing done for the backend of throwing this all away. Like nobody had the foresight to think about.

the repercussions of long-term use of something that's going to be thrown away.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (15:00)
I mean, that's not how our safety system works. You know, it's not like prove that this is safe. It's like, someday somebody's like, this is dangerous. And then you've got to like prove that it's dangerous, which is kind of crazy that we're not, you know, concerned. It's like, you can be on a list for being dangerous, but you never have to prove that you're.

safe. We have a list of chemicals, a very small list of chemicals that you can't use because people have proven that they are dangerous. Whereas the EU has a huge, huge list of chemicals that they can't use because people can't prove that they're safe. ⁓

Jess & Michele (15:38)
rights so backwards and plastic is not safe so and it's

also not good for the environment long run so

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (15:46)
It's not good for the environment,

it's not good for our bodies, you know, it's not good for climate change. Plastic is related to fossil fuels. It's all tied in there together. ⁓

Jess & Michele (15:52)
Mm-mm.

Yes. And in the Bahamas

where they didn't have, it sounds like it was piling up because they didn't have any infrastructure to deal with it. mean, our infrastructure for so long to deal with it, to recycle it, was to ship it off to some other country who was taking care of that on the back end, but not really.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (16:19)
mean,

I think that's still mostly what we're doing. I mean, we can't send it to China anymore, but we're still sending it away somewhere. I think they are recycling some, but again, plastic's so cheap, it's not really worth it to recycle it. And that's a toxic process.

Jess & Michele (16:22)
Yeah.

Somewhere.

Mm-hmm.

exactly as we saw in the documentary, it impacts communities where these plants are producing it or recycling it. I spoke with the director of Earth Day Foundation last year about this topic in particular. And sometimes it's incinerated to get rid of it. That's not recycling.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (17:00)
Yeah, then we're breathing. Great.

Great. Yeah, no, that is not recycling it. That is not recycling it. And as I said, you need

Jess & Michele (17:05)
⁓ That's creating

another problem. That's all it's doing in our air. And especially for the communities where it's happening, whether they're incinerating it, recycling it, because it has to be broken down, which is a process that has a lot of off-gassing, or they're producing it, it's no good for those communities. So the solution is to bypass it all together. And how did you do that?

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (17:10)
Yeah,

I'll it at

I mean, the goal there is just to create some packaging that is durable and has some value. So we ended up with aluminum, we looked at glass and we do use some glass. We're just a little worried about glass in the shower, slippery kids. ⁓ So we looked at stainless actually, but it turns out that all stainless is not stainless. ⁓ That's a whole. That's a whole water, that's a whole water.

Jess & Michele (17:56)
Has chemicals in it. Depending on where you get

it from,

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (18:01)
Yeah, was a whole

other fun journey. But anyway, we ended up with aluminum. It does have a liner to make sure that aluminum is not always great. It can leach into the products and cause, you know, bad things. So we do have a liner. I wish that liner was plant based. We've asked for that liner to be plant based. Hopefully one day it will be. ⁓ But it is least BPA free. There's nothing bad in it. It's inert. And so we send you a bottle, send you a pump, and then we send you a refill bottle.

Jess & Michele (18:04)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (18:31)
switch the pump over, send us back the empty bottle and then we wash them, sterilize them, get them refilled, send them back out into the world. And so what's crazy to me is it's not that complicated and it's not that hard. know, people are like, how do you do? I'm like, we know how to wash things. We wash it.

Jess & Michele (18:50)
How did you find a facility that would wash it?

Where's who's we?

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (18:57)
We plane products we have a we have a warehouse where we do all of our fulfillment and we have a bottle washer and a bottle dryer at the warehouse There was a picture of it. I can show you a picture of it. But yeah There's the end of the master class of my sister and I in front of our bottle washer just so people again green washing

Jess & Michele (19:03)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's OK. It will be inside the master class, which will be available. ⁓ Yeah.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (19:20)
I love to make, I love to show people that we're actually doing it. If there's no warehouse somewhere where all the bottles are piled up, you know, hiding, like we actually do wash the bottles, reuse the bottles, reuse the boxes. Yeah, it's not hard. It's not, it's not crazy. It's just a little extra cost, a little extra time, and you gotta have people willing to do it.

Jess & Michele (19:44)
So, okay, so you have this bottle washer that you purchased and you're doing it in the place where you're fulfilling your orders, This is where you're cleaning the bottles as they come back to you.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (19:54)
Yeah,

there's two different rooms going on. There's a back room where the returns come in. We sort them. We wash them. We dry them. We store them. And then there's a front of the warehouse where all the fill bottles are stored and we're packing boxes out of that and sending them out into the world. So those boxes are going out, empty boxes, boxes full of empties are coming in and we're washing them. And so there's just always something going on. Stuff's going on. Coming in. Yeah.

Jess & Michele (20:21)
Always something.

That's really amazing. this brings me, you just said boxes, and I know that you also do really well with recycling your boxes. So you send out a box for people to send their empties back to you and.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (20:31)
video.

So we

refill, so you get a shampoo, comes with a bottle. We send you a refill shampoo bottle, just the bottle, and a refill. That first empty bottle, once it's empty, you can put it in that same box, put the label on the outside, and it comes back to us.

Jess & Michele (20:40)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

So you're reusing even boxes too.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (20:57)
We reuse a box five, six, seven times before. It's recycled paper when we get it, but we reuse it as many times as we can before it gets recycled again.

Jess & Michele (21:07)
before you can't use it anymore. It's too broken

down or whatever. Yeah. So that's really a good thing to know as well, because we do need to think about all of the products that we're utilizing. Mm-hmm. Right.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (21:20)
mean, have to make and that's versus

energy. That's time. That's money. So, you know, every time that we can reuse a box, that's one less box that has to be made that we have to pay for that has to be made out of something that energy to be made. I mean, all, all the resources, all the things.

Jess & Michele (21:39)
And that probably does come back to helping to keep the costs down because you're reusing so many of these materials that would otherwise just be a one-time cost, one and done. But other than that being one way that you're able to keep costs down a little bit, there is sometimes a discrepancy between the cost of this and what you can find at the shelves.

the grocery store or Target or the big box stores. ⁓ And I know there's no difference between the cost of this and something that's at the salon. And oftentimes, that's even more costly. But for people who are maybe not buying the salon, more expensive types of products. Can you walk through how we can justify the cost difference

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (22:26)
Well, there's a few different views. I mean, you were talking to a girl who had $4 suave for a long time because I didn't know any better. but yes, it turns out when you put, if you look at the back of it, water, chemical, chemical, chemical, chemical in a plastic bottle, that is really cheap. Super cheap. mean, there's literally not anything natural going on.

Jess & Michele (22:45)
Super cheap. Yeah.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (22:53)
any of those super cheap products. So that's just the reality. I mean, that's just, you are putting a lot of chemicals on your body. ⁓

Jess & Michele (23:04)
So

there's a choice to be made. For me, it was about quality, wanting to have something that's quality. And also, I feel like it lasts a lot longer because you're not using as much.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (23:10)
Yes.

Yes.

So here's the other piece,

when you have a giant bottle that's mostly water and some chemicals, you turn it upside down or you keep, you're like, I need more, I need more. Or you squeeze it and you have this much in your hand and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. So our products, main and first ingredient is aloe, not water. And then it's a bunch of plants. And you get a little bit and you put it in your hair.

Jess & Michele (23:29)
Mm-hmm.

Too much came out. Yeah.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (23:48)
And then you can actually just add water, water from the shower in your hair and just work it around and it lathers up. And that's the main difference is you don't need more product. You just need a little bit of product and more water. So yes, our bottles are more expensive, but they last six months. Easy. Easy. So, you know, when you're thinking about it, okay, you're paying $4 now or you're paying $30, but it's six months. That's $5, you know.

Jess & Michele (24:06)
Mm-hmm.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (24:18)
a month. I did see something once that sort of I think it was talking about organic food. It was like, you know, instead of wondering why something so expensive, maybe we need to wonder why this other cheap. I think that's kind of what it comes down to. It's like, you know, if you just you just got to pick where you're spending the money and why. And for me,

Jess & Michele (24:19)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah.

true.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (24:44)
what I put on my body, what affects my health, what affects my kids' health, what, you know, all of that, that's going to be more important to me than some other things that I do or don't buy. I... We have to have the education first to have the shift in values. I didn't know any better, so I kept doing it. But then, you know, it's like anything else. It's like once you see the plastic and you start to look around and realize it's everywhere and...

Jess & Michele (24:57)
Yeah, it's a shift in values and that happens with awareness.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (25:13)
and how much you're touching it and how much it's touching you then you, once you find out about the chemicals that you're putting on your body, no, no, no, I don't wanna keep doing it. So it is, you know, but I don't think you can, you don't know what you don't know.

Jess & Michele (25:20)
You can't un-know.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (25:30)
you know, I don't think it's anything people should feel bad about or, you you just don't know what you don't know. And then once you do know, you try and do better. You try and not have a lot of plastic in your kitchen and use bamboo or use metal. don't put plastic in the microwave with food in it. If you do nothing else, don't put plastic food with plastic in the microwave. You know, I mean, you try and start...

Jess & Michele (25:34)
Nope. Right.

you

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (25:56)
I don't like the term zero waste because I don't like zero because it feels like you have to be perfect or you can't do anything. And one of the things that I loved about the Netflix documentary was they were like, let's just redo some and see how you do. none of them were perfect. None of them got rid of all the plastic in their life. But by getting rid of some of the plastic in the kitchen, changing out some of their products, all of their levels went down in two months, three months,

It works, we can do things that have a real impact. And so you don't have to be perfect. It's okay. Sometimes if it happens, we live in a disposable plastic world. It is everywhere, but what

Jess & Michele (26:34)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, you actually

have to work hard at it.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (26:39)
You have to work hard at it, but there are choices. There are more choices every day. And you know, now you don't have to sacrifice quality for those choices, which you used to. So I think that's important too.

Jess & Michele (26:41)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, there are a lot of choices out there. think that it's moving in the right direction because people are starting to become aware. I think that not all of the, a lot of choices out there are the best choices. So that's where it gets, that's where it gets a little bit challenging, I'd say, to be sifting through all of the what is good and what is not good and yeah.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (27:13)
Yeah. mean, the whole composable thing. Yeah.

But that's why people like you were important. And I think there are other people that are calling BS on stuff, that this Grove Collaborative is working on. And they did exhaustive testing on everything to make sure that everybody was standing by their

their products. I'm proud to say that we're in it. And then I'm proud to say that we're in it because, again, I believe things should be tested. I believe people should have to answer questions. You shouldn't be able to hide behind things.

Jess & Michele (27:46)
it's so good that people are starting to be more aware as consumers of what we're bringing into our homes, what we're putting on our bodies, and how it's impacting our health.

And now I like to always add in that layer of how it impacts our planet because they're interconnected, they're not separate at all.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (28:04)
need the planet, I mean the planet doesn't need us. And if we keep filling it with toxic chemicals, yeah.

Jess & Michele (28:08)
true.

Yeah, it's not

going to be a pretty sight. And in many places, it already isn't.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (28:19)
And climate change is here. again, you know, I lived in the Bahamas, my husband's family's from the Bahamas, know, hurricanes are different now than they were 10 years ago. They are stronger, they increase faster. There's rain. I mean, I don't think there's normal weather anymore, anywhere. Hot, cold, wet, I mean, it's all, you know, it's here. And so I think

Jess & Michele (28:21)
Yeah.

I don't think so.

And

faster than scientists were expecting it to be. Yeah, like in the ocean, there are changes that are happening faster than scientists were anticipating. so yeah, it's not, we're blessed and we're able to look around and not see this piling up in our backyards just yet. But, you know, they're actually trying to ramp up plastic production instead of

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (28:48)
Yeah, I mean, we are, are.

Jess & Michele (29:11)
finally realizing what it's doing to the environment and to human health and the cost of all of that. And yeah, we're going to have to make different decisions because nobody else is making different decisions. The corporations using the plastic packaging is not changing things. And ⁓ there are no regulations that are coming down the pipes anytime soon to slow things down.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (29:15)
No. What? Yes.

Jess & Michele (29:37)
Even though there are people out there trying, it's just not coming through. And it takes time. If it does come through, it takes too long. Years. Yeah, that's right. Yep.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (29:39)
Excuse me.

Yeah, I was just-

Yeah, and there's too money. I mean, there's too much money in it for people

away from it, unfortunately. So, yes.

Jess & Michele (29:54)
Well, fortunately,

there are people out there like you doing all the things right, and ⁓ we have options. We have choices. So that's the biggest thing.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (30:02)
Yeah, and right now

we're shipping a lot more than I would like to be shipping bottles around the country. But I sort of say it was like solar panels in the 80s, like when they cost a lot and people that could use them, use them, and then more and more in volume and volume, and then they became cheap and now they're affordable. That's kind of what we're trying to do with reuse. Like right now we got to ship it around, they all got to come back to us, be washed, because there's not washing facilities all over the country.

could be, there will be, if there's need for them. you know, again, yeah.

Jess (30:35)
It's true.

Yeah. It's kind of like once there's the need, then the infrastructure has to reply. It's just it has to start as an intention. And then once that intention is there, it grows because people get on board and they

They want better and they want to support companies like yours who are doing all the right things in your small business and you care about people, you care about the planet and you're putting all of that over the bottom line. So thank you for what you're doing out there in the world, Lindsay and thank you for joining me today. I really appreciate our conversation.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (31:14)
Well, I really appreciate it. As you said, we all are a small business and you don't want to be a best kept secret when you're a small business. So we always appreciate any way to tell people that we're there and what we're trying to do.

Jess (31:26)
if you'd like more information about these products, Lindsay actually has a slideshow presentation that she went through for her master class. There is a link in the description. It's free.

And you can find out more about her product as well as many other products that you can use to replace all of the things that you're looking for to bring your household up to speed when it comes to health, safety, and being environmentally friendly for Mother Earth. Thank you again for joining us.

Lindsey McCoy, Plaine Products (32:00)
Thank you.