Nantucket Spider Reviews 

Antwoord van Nantucket Spider

19 sep 2024

We are so happy you had a great experience! Thank you for your review, Jessi!

Antwoord van Nantucket Spider

19 sep 2024

We are so happy you like them, Barbara! Thank you for your thorough and kind review!

Antwoord van Nantucket Spider

19 sep 2024

We appreciate your review, thank you E!

Antwoord van Nantucket Spider

Geüpdatet op 19 sep 2024

Ours too! Thank you for your review!

Antwoord van Nantucket Spider

19 sep 2024

Hi Lois,

Thank you for your review - I understand your disappointment about our laundry strips being made in China.

China is a huge polluter - the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, producing a sobering 12.7 billion metric tons of emissions annually. That dwarfs U.S. emissions, which are currently about 5.9 billion tons annually. Moreover, China has a deeply troubling record with regard to human rights abuse. And yet, Nantucket Spider has chosen to have our Nantucket Footprint line of laundry strips made in China - so the question is - why?

First, a little background: 

Nantucket Spider is a mission-driven company. Because of our mission and our verified social and environmental performance record, we have recently been granted B Corporation Certification, which is a designation that a business is meeting high standards of performance, accountability, and transparency on factors including charitable giving, environmental impact, supply chain practices, and input materials. We believe that ethical and environmentally sustainable businesses are not only possible but are necessary for our planet's future. And this knowledge informs our company's actions in everything we do. So, choosing where we make our products is carefully thought out. Our commitment to ethical and environmentally sustainable business includes making products locally whenever possible, making sure the products are made with fair labor, using the cleanest and least toxic ingredients available, being transparent with our ingredients, and donating profits to preserve and protect our one beautiful and precious planet. (We are partners with Rainforest Trust).

With over 1.2 billion plastic cleaning containers discarded in the U.S. each year, a few years back, Nantucket Spider put its best thinking into making highly effective cleaning strips that are safer, biodegradable, kept in compostable (non-plastic) child-resistant packaging and leave a much smaller footprint. We aptly named this line "Nantucket Footprint." Because our cleaning strips have no water, they don't need toxic preservatives, they don't need to be carried in heavy plastic containers, and the environmental energy spent transporting them is vastly reduced.

So why are our strips made in China? 
When Nantucket Spider set out to create our new line of products, we wanted to obtain everything locally or at least from North America. We quickly learned that in our global economy, this is not possible: the technology for the cleaning strips is Chinese, and the infrastructure to make the strips does not yet exist in the U.S. Even if there were a U.S. manufacturer, the raw materials for most cleaning products sold in the U.S. and the base materials are all created in China with no alternative North American source. Our ecological footprint is significantly smaller when we import the light cleaning strips from China than if we import barrels of raw materials and produce them in the USA.  

So, how are we navigating this? We have direct relationships with each person we work with in China. Most are smaller-scale companies. None is located in the western regions or Xinjiang province (which have been most closely associated with human rights violations). We work closely with their engineers to do our custom formulations, which we develop from ingredients recognized as safest in their category. All this being said, we continue to have it on our radar to source and manufacture our cleaning products closer to home as soon as the infrastructure and materials become available.

I hope this helps to provide a bit more understanding about our manufacturing process - please let me know if you have any follow up questions and I would be happy to help!