While climate change may be difficult to visualize on a day-to-day basis, Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist for the
National Centre for Atmospheric Science, made it easy by releasing a shocking image that visually demonstrated in colored stripes the rising temperatures of the planet. It was this simple, yet powerful, image that inspired Romain Gaillard, founder and CEO of clean beauty retailer the
Detox Market, to launch the
Earth CPR Initiative.
“When I came across the #ShowYourStripes campaign—a simple, fact-based, visual representation of the global rise in temperature over the past 120 years—I was stunned,” says Gaillard in a statement on the Detox Market website. “Comparing where my parents were born on the chart to where my birth year fell was eye-opening enough, but when I placed my kids on the dark red stripes? I realized things needed to change, and soon.”
As part of the initiative, the company is introducing the image as an installation in its New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles locations. The retailer is also instituting recycling and bringing in
TerraCycle, a company that collects hard-to-recycle consumer waste and finds ways to turn it into raw materials, to all its stores.
Additionally, the brand has set a goal of planting 500,000 trees in 2020 and at least 2.5 million trees by 2025 in the hopes of becoming carbon negative. The Detox Market is engaging its customer base in the process by promising to plant a tree for every product sold from its in-house brand,
Detox Mode, and its
Sustainability Collection, including the
Sustainability Set, which consists of a reusable bag, a reusable silicone sandwich bag, and reusable bamboo straws. The initiative includes a customer-based social media campaign as well. The brand has promised to plant a tree whenever someone posts on Instagram one of three graphics from its website, which all read “Sustainability starts now,” tags the
Detox Market, and uses the hashtag #sustainabilitystartsnow. At the time of this post, the Detox Market has planted over 55,000 trees.
