Please read the case study that follows, then download the Case Study 1 Ethique Answer Sheet, answer the questions, and then submit the answer sheet into the Case Study 1 dropbox in the Assessments section of the 115116 Stream site before the due date. Case study – Ethique: Balancing planet and profit Kiwi founder Brianne West’s story is one that conforms to the classic myth of the entrepreneur who discovers gold while tinkering at home. While studying her biology and chemistry degree, West became aware of the phenomenal amount of plastic generated through the bottles for beauty products. West experimented in her Christchurch kitchen with taking the water out of beauty products, instead producing them in bars. As a poor university student who was only 24 years old, she didn’t have capital to invest in the business, so she used the living costs from her student loan to buy ingredients (Nadkarndi, 2019). The result was the world’s first zero-waste beauty brand. Ethique was founded in 2012 with the goal of saving one million plastic bottles from landfill by 2020 (West, 2021). So far, she has managed to save 12 million bottles by tapping into consumer concerns over the amount of plastic in our environment (Ethique, n.d.). In the last 50 years, the growth in the use of plastics has become a large-scale problem that threatens the fragile ecology of our earth. Plastic replaced natural products like wood and steel, or paper and glass in packaging. However, plastic was not without its problems, and the majority of plastic was produced for single use. The United Nations estimates that around 8.3 billion tonnes of plastics have been produced since the early 1950s, and that around 60% of this plastic has ended up in landfills or the natural environment (UNEP, 2018). The amount of discarded plastic is becoming a significant problem due to the time it takes to decompose, with some plastics taking up to 400 years to break down (WWF, 2018). This means that nearly all of the plastic produced over the time period we have been making it is still in existence in one form or another. This plastic is contaminating our oceans and forests, polluting the environment for animals, and in the process disrupting the food chains that humans are dependent on. A study from Australian researchers found that the problem is so bad that the average person now consumes the equivalent of a credit card in plastic per week through tiny particles in their water and food (Rorlich, 2019). West says, “I knew that 75% of liquid shampoo and up to 95% of liquid conditioner is water. That just seemed wrong, because not only do you need to package that in plastic, but you also need to ship all of the extra weight. Then the end consumer uses the product i