Story by Raphaella Bennin for Living on Earth. Listen to audio above for full story.

A home cleaning and personal care products company wants to scrub the great outdoors, or at least part of it. It plans to collect plastic from a massive trash pile in the Pacific Ocean and recycle it into a laundry detergent bottle.

The company, Method, produces soap, detergent, and multi-purpose sprays. It already makes its spray bottles and pump canisters from 100 percent recycled materials. Now, Method is teaming up with Envision Plastics to make a container with 25 percent recycled trash from the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”

The garbage patch sits in the North Pacific Gyre – a system of currents that swirl the ocean’s waters. Discarded fishing nets, plastic bottles, and waste dumped by cruise ships twist together in the middle of the ocean, over an area some scientists say is the size of Texas. Some of that trash washes up on the shores of Hawaii and California.

Method knows its cleaning efforts won’t rid the ocean of this great garbage vortex, but the company hopes that its message in a bottle will increase awareness of the problem, and encourage more people to recycle.

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