With the majority of press surrounding Microsoft’s recent Surface event focused upon the company’s intriguing more-than-meets-the-eye flagship laptop, the Surface Laptop Studio, alongside other 2-in-1 form factors reflective of the company’s commitment to convertible computing devices it was easy to miss the reveal of a smaller accessory – an eco-design conceived to reuse plastic detritus collected from the ocean and turn it into a point and click peripheral, the Ocean Plastic Mouse.

“The team wondered, why couldn’t we make a resin out of plastic in the ocean and make a dent there?” said Patrick Gaule, senior designer on the Windows & Devices design team. “We started formalizing this idea. What type of resin? What kind of product? We came up with a plan to look into it. We were sure it was going to be very hard. We weren’t sure it was going to work.”

And thus Microsoft set out to conceive a scalable method for converting gathered plastic bottles, bottle caps, packaging and other discarded waste polluting waterways and coastlines, breaking them down into raw polymer resin pellets to form the external shell of their new mouse.

Because ocean plastic tends to already exhibit signs of molecular degradation caused by heat, ultraviolet light, moisture and salt exposure (left long enough to churn in the ocean, these plastics degrade into the minuscule nightmare known as microplastics now found in nearly every water source and ecosystem), the Microsoft team needed to discover new methods ensuring the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) commonly used to make water bottles into a material suitable for a consumer electronic device.

“The resin used is polyester, which is good for water bottle applications but not a common material used for consumer electronics,” said Tony Li, a principal mechanical engineer for Surface devices. “That’s the challenge. All plastics have different behavior. Polyester has higher mold shrinkage, lower heat deflection and the material has higher moisture absorption than other resins more commonly used for hardware enclosures.”

The Ocean Plastic Mouse is available now for $24.99 via Microsoft.com.