Why this shelf exists.

Plastic belongs in many things. In bumpers, in pipes, in the housings of useful machines. It does not belong in the soap that touches your skin, in the food that goes into your child, in the powder that washes your sheets.

This is the simplest observation we could find, and it kept being true. The products we live with most closely — the ones that touch our bodies and our food and our floors every day — are the ones we examine least. Their packaging is plastic. Their bottles are plastic. Their wrappers, their lids, their applicators, their refills.

Most of it does not need to be.

We started ONLIVA because we got tired of reading labels. We wanted a shelf where the reading was already done — where every product on it had been measured against one published rule, and the rule was binary, and the exceptions were named.

That is what The Standard is. That is what this shelf is for. Notes from the work will land here, monthly: what we found, what passed, what almost passed and didn't, who we wrote to. Slow on purpose. Useful, we hope.