The unlikely story of the Tuffy pot scrubber and the marine biologists who can’t live without it.
in the late 1980s, Bruce Menge was wandering the aisles of a grocery store, thinking over a particular problem he was having with plankton. A professor of marine biology at Oregon State University, Menge is a specialist in what’s known as a meta-ecosystem, the place where two discrete ecologies collide. In his case, the spot where the land meets the sea.
Within a few years, Menge and his lab were ordering Tuffys by the dozens, then the hundreds. Word had spread. The sponge was quickly becoming mussel recruitment medium for marine biologists around the globe. It worked with species in Connecticut and Chile, in South Africa and New Zealand, and along the coasts of both the US and Australia. Best of all, it was affordable, easy to find, and standardized.
Within the world of marine scientists studying shoreline ecosystems, the Tuffy discontinuation was a tsunami. But to the Clorox Company, it was but an indistinguishable ripple in the sea of consumer desire. Some thought the sponge could have stood to improve at what it was designed to do. Menge certainly thought so. “The thing about a Tuffy,” he says, “is it’s actually a pretty terrible scrubbing pad. But they are great for recruiting mussels.
While it can be hard on consumers to lose something they’ve used and grown accustomed to—there are entire message board discussions dedicated to the discontinued Tuffy—they don’t quite come to depend on it the way researchers do. There’s a difference between a tool for pot scrubbing and a scientific standard; for the latter, even the closest analog could introduce a variable that could skew the data.
A lot of modern life is like this: Collisions of happenstance set us on paths we stick to for far longer than seems logical. Consider the automobile—the kind that requires us to pull fossilized plankton up out of the earth and set it on fire to make it go. In their early days, steam- and electric-powered cars were just as popular as those that used internal combustion, if not more so.
When she first learned about the Great Tuffy Vanishing, Caselle was of course worried, but not too worried. Sure, she called around, looking into finding a replacement. But her lab already had a solution. She’d always felt terrible about having to throw the scrubbers out and so had instituted the unspooling, drying, and re-bundling routine.
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