"I've always been crazy but it's kept me from going insane." — Waylon Jennings, I've Always Been Crazy “Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.” — Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

Drew’s Honeybees cares to realize better outcomes. We care to align our values and actions. We eagerly invite others to use our tube and all the particulars–point of sale packaging, means of fill manufacture, shrink wraps, expertise and anything else. We give away our most valuable thing. We mean it when we say we’ll broaden the good for the benefit of all. 🤷

People say I’m crazy. People want an explanation. This is that explanation.

Product creation is a moral act. Predictable outcomes follow product creation, use, and disposal. These outcomes affect people. They can be good, bad, mixed, and anywhere in between. In this way, product creation is the treatment of other people, scaled. Any one piece of packaging is small, sure. But packaging is used millions, billions of times. A small thing multiplied by 100 million is no longer a small thing. There is a 1.6 million square kilometer plastic garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean. Our world is awash in garbage. Harmful compounds from packaging are in us. That ain't good. It was never the deal. Had it been the deal we would have rioted.

If product creation is a moral act then there are moral deliberations. How do you consider others? Do you cultivate empathy or hide from it? What are the life cycles of your materials? Do you hide the worst aspects of your products? Are you honest about recyclability? Do you search for your personal connection to what is wrong? Do you ready your body, mind, and mettle to right the wrong?

If product creation is a moral act with moral deliberations then there are morally good outcomes, morally bad outcomes and everything in between. Let’s look at a bad, but illustrative, example that the packaging industry repeats sadly often.

Plastisol is a spongy polyvinyl chloride (PVC) compound. In packaging it commonly forms a seal between two hard surfaces, like a cap and a jar.

Plastisol gives off volatile organic gasses^[1] harmful to your health. By law, manufacturers are responsible for putting a Prop 65 warning on products containing PVC^[2] sold in California. Prop 65 identifies products containing chemical compounds known to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm. Uncle Sam may not be far behind.^[3] Given the risk, why use PVC where it touches food and gives off harmful gasses in a contained space, like a jar of honey? There are other ways to create a seal. Fit and safer materials are two. A controlled crystallization process for a velvety honey increases desirability and makes the honey a soft, non-leaking solid. We don’t use a compounding human harm to hold your food.^[4] I'm surprised I have to say this.

The first honey company to go plastic and plastisol-free is led by “the dumb beekeeper.” Worse yet, it’s a good description. Why did a better lip balm tube fall to a dumb beekeeper?

There are newer compounds to replace PVC-derived plastisol. They cost a bit more, but they're better for you and your planet.

Let’s explore another example.

Bisphenols are a class of synthetic compounds made from oil. They give plastics functional characteristics. Around 2007, studies began linking Bisphenol A (BPA)^[5] to interference in human hormones. Interference in hormones leads to all kinds of bad things. Due to customer wariness, companies made a big hullabaloo about removing BPA from their products (BPA Free!). But many simply swapped in Bisphenol S (BPS). They swapped out a known danger for a likely dangerous but technically unknown. Can you guess the rest? BPS has similar, if not greater, risks.^[6] Who coulda seen that one coming? This happens again and again and again and again. When science identifies a harm, industry swaps in an unknown. It’s like a game of musical chairs, except instead of having fun everyone is being deceptive and grinning.

I do not know why we so routinely hide from the reality of moral deliberations, acts, and consequences. In business, we have dim absolving sayings and whinings, “it’s just business.” Or “this is how we do it.” Or, “it’d be hard.” My business is a big part of my acts while I’m blessed to be on this earth. I refuse to pretend business is an amoral space, especially when amorality is used to justify lack of good innovation.

You can pretend to hide behind not knowing, but the ruse is up. A manufacturer may claim ignorance of plastic and plasticizer harm. But ignorance at this juncture is either willful or weird. How someone navigates these decisions, how they wrestle with painful realities, says much about them. What they will try to get away with. How deeply they are able to deceive themselves and their capacity to care. How they’ll put their profit over the wellbeing of others. It also says a good deal about the capacity to dream and their mettle to posse up and create the dream.

The failings I allege are my own. Our first lip balms were plastic. That is my failing. Our second tubes were going to be cardboard coated in particularly scary and lasting industrial pollutant, perfluoroalkyl/polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). I decided I’d rather fail going for something good than pass the predictable harm of PFAS to anyone. Acknowledging my personal connection to what is wrong was the first step in remedy. Drew’s Honeybees may fail, but we will live our values.

Some say I’m naive. This is true, but they miss the point. I don’t expect to greatly alter the ecological burden of packaging, much less the acceptance of harm to others common in business. I don’t make decisions based on such probabilities. I feel a responsibility, a moral imperative, to work toward things that are good and just. You may call this simple, dumb, naive, or stupid. You’ll find more agreement here than you might guess. To borrow from the great and gone Vaclav Havel, “There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.” Or, if Atticus Finch is more your speed, “Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try to win,” This is why we call it “the good fight.” Good people take it up in defiance of the likely outcome.

The convention in packaging does not serve us. It treads upon generations to follow.

Some people say, “why care?” We screwed the pooch long ago. I’ll give you four reasons-

1. Caring is a happier way to live a life.
2. Resigned nihilism is a sadder way to live a life.
3. Failure and success are not binary. It can always be worse. It can always be better too.
4. “Why care?” is dreadfully wimpy. We were once a people who, through committed and stalwart action, made things better in far bleaker hours than this. Must things get awful before we act?

Why are we so slow to deliver good, healthier innovation? Our problem is not that we don’t know. Our problem is not that innovation is impossible. We don’t lack the money/ability/evidence to act. Our problem is that we look at a problem we are part of and look away. Our problem is that we lack the practice to stop problems with us. We are accustomed to divorce our values and our actions. Our problem is we lack a culture of looking at a problem, getting sharkish, and solving it. Our problem is that “do no harm” is just a cute ethic of no real application.

It may seem odd to apply moral considerations to consumer goods and their packaging, but it is fitting given the known, predictable, and growing harms of chemical compounds like PFAS, bisphenols, and phthalates that are sadly common in consumer goods.

^[1] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (n.d.). Volatile organic compounds' impact on indoor air quality. EPA. https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/volatile-organic-compounds-impact-indoor-air-quality

^[2] Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. (n.d.). Vinyl chloride. California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/chemicals/vinyl-chloride

^[3] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. (2024, April 16). EPA begins process to prioritize five chemicals for risk evaluation under the Toxic Substances Control Act. https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-begins-process-prioritize-five-chemicals-risk-evaluation-under-toxic-substances

^[4] Rochman, C. M., Browne, M. A., Halpern, B. S., Hentschel, B. T., Hoh, E., Karapanagioti, H. K., Rios-Mendoza, L. M., Takada, H., Teh, S., & Thompson, R. C. (2013). Classify plastic waste as hazardous. Nature, 494(7436), 169–171. https://doi.org/10.1038/494169a

^[5] Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. (n.d.). Bisphenol A (BPA). California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/chemicals/bisphenol-bpa

^[6] Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. (n.d.). Bisphenol S (BPS). California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. https://oehha.ca.gov/proposition-65/chemicals/bisphenol-s-bps