Our History
We envision a better future with our planet-healthy packaging
Coming from a family of packaging engineers and manufacturers and raised in the paper mill town of Old Town, Maine, the idea for better packaging first sparked when P3RD.EARTH Founder, Ariadne Dimoula, was a kid swimming in the Penobscot River and saw fast food litter everywhere. She went home and asked her mom, Claudia Lowd - a pulp and paper chemical engineer, if paper mills could make better packaging than the styrofoam forever trash. Fast-forward more than ten years to when Ariadne was in Mexico scuba diving with sea turtles and later drinking a coconut with a plastic straw on the beach, when it hit her again, harder. “We are feeding animals trash.” Just like everyone on her sea turtle trip, Ariadne was there to celebrate the beautiful marine life, but was also harming it with her tropical vacation behaviors. Not willing to accept the status quo, she envisioned a better future, one where our products would have an end of life that had been considered in their development. Ariadne knew the solution to the ocean trash problem already existed: paper. What if she could replace the glut of plastic litter clogging our oceans and killing our marine life with products made from biodegradable paper? Ariadne teamed up with Claudia, and they got to work.
Following the wisdom of nature – where all waste is just food for something else – Ariadne and Claudia created P3RD.EARTH, a company working at the intersection of marine science and pulp and paper engineering to make planet-healthy products. By innovating cellulose microfibers, a component of paper-making, P3RD.EARTH will only create products that are better for our planet and its oceans, and will redesign mills with its safe and clean production processes. Claudia and Ariadne envision a world where mill communities can be revitalized to be beautiful places to live and work, and where our packaging waste leaves no trace and causes no harm.