To celebrate Earth Month, we’re shedding some light on one company trying to make great change. Founded by San Diego-based parents Marisa and Luke Wilson, Canary is on a mission to reduce the amount of plastic in your home—starting with the bathroom. Its signature products include toothpaste tablets, mouthwash, dental floss, bar soap, clay face masks, and a refillable hand soap system—all plastic-free and encased in more Earth-friendly packaging.

The brand’s name, Canary, comes from the phrase “canary in a coal mine” (an early warning of danger). And, as Luke reminds us, the seemingly small items we use in our homes daily (toothpaste tubes, hand soap bottles, floss containers) end up wrecking major havoc on our environment.

Below, the passionate dad of three (August, 10, Avery, 7, and Emmeline, 2), shares more about Canary and his other company, Bloop—a healthier laundry soap that replaces the typical hormone-disrupting and other toxic ingredients with clean ingredients.

What was the impetus for starting Canary? “Sustainability and natural health ideologies are things that were instilled in me from my mother since I was born. I grew up on a small self-sustaining farm in Texas and my wonderful mother owned a vegetarian restaurant in Colorado before I was born and then later owned a small health food and wellness store in my hometown. After earning an MBA in sustainability and then working for more than a decade for larger brands, the same entrepreneurial spirit (that my mother had) called me to create a brand where the entire mission was based on sustainability.”

“Now, as parents of three young kids, we wanted the business to focus on creating a cleaner world for our children. After looking around the house and bathroom, it was disturbing how much plastic was in our daily rituals, and that the majority of it wasn’t truly recyclable. We don’t want our children to live in a world of plastic trash from our generation.”

What facts about waste caused by common household items can you share? “It has been well studied and documented recently that only 5% of plastic actually gets recycled. In regards to toothpaste in particular, globally 1.5 billion toothpaste tubes are tossed annually—that’s enough to fill up 50 Empire State Buildings. Similarly, think about all of the wasted plastic floss containers (estimated 700M in the U.S. alone) and millions of miles of floss, most of it plastic. And for all of those single use plastic hand soap bottles and even the refill containers (yes, more plastic), an estimated 5 billion single use hand soap bottles are thrown away every year. With all of the recent medical buzz about how much plastic is getting into every organ and tissue in the human body, we believe this is a much bigger problem than most people realize. So we want to do better, and be a part of the change.”

How do your products help combat this waste? “Other than the small hand soap pumps (that are made for a long life of use) that are in our foaming hand soap kits, we are a completely plastic-free company. Our toothpaste tablets come in refillable (and recyclable) glass jars with metal lids. Our new dental floss comes in a tiny cardboard box and is made with biodegradable PLA (corn starch), and our novel foaming hand soap systems are packaged in cardboard and our bottles are glass. And most of our products are also designed to be compact and without excessive water (which is impactful to ship around too). The customer adds water to the hand soap, as well as our highly concentrated mouthwash (which comes in a glass bottle). Our product offering and branding is also intended to ‘provoke the purge of plastic’ and inspire everyone to try to think differently about these everyday products and how we can create and use more closed-loop and less environmentally impactful products and daily rituals.”

Tell us about how Bloop came to be. “Bloop is a little less focused on the plastic issue (our cartons do have a plastic liner currently, although they do reduce plastic by 80% or more (vs. typical plastic laundry jugs), but is more focused on healthier laundry products. Typical laundry detergent uses many hormone-disrupting and other toxic ingredients and we are aiming to address and challenge this. We founded Bloop with another couple (Trevor and Katie Young, close friends of ours) who approached us to help them create better laundry products after Katie survived breast cancer. Since breast cancer and other cancers have impacted our family as well (my mother passed away a few years ago from cancer), we were also motivated by this cause.”

What would you love for folks to know about Canary—and Bloop? “We just hope that folks will think about all of the plastic around their home, and consider all of the ingredients used in everyday products, and inspire them to try our brands or even similar brands that are striving to leave a better impact on the world.”

Find more about Canary at canarycleanco.com (and @canarycleanco on Instagram), and Bloop at heybloop.com (and @bloop.stuff on Instagram).