Is your Company Killing the Ocean? Here are 4 Ways your Brand can Help Save the Planet

It’s no news that the world today is in dire need of redemption.

According to a climate change report, the earth has been the warmest ever recorded in over 120,000 years. In another report, 100,000 marine creatures are killed every year as a result of plastic waste that find their way into our oceans.

Diverse companies all over the world are the major cause of this ocean degradation. The brands we create with the core focus of changing the world are changing the world and killing it at same time.

How can we save the precious life of the ocean? It starts with you and the brand you control. It starts from the decisions you make today and how you enforce them into reality.

Here are 4 ways you can use your brands to save the planet.

1. Start Using Digestible Bags

Plastic bags are not only non-biodegradable, they are non-digestible to ocean animals. When these bags get into the ocean they constitute major problems that cost us dearly. As much as 100,000 marine creatures are killed annually due to choking and entanglement.

Thanks to the call to save the planet, few bag manufacturers are now designing edible bags. Startups like Envigreen, Crafting Plastics and Avani Eco are manufacturing bags from Cornstarch, sugar and used cooking oil. These bags when digested by sea animals can dissolve into their core properties without harming them.

What Your Brand can do:

• Slowly but steadily change all product packaging from non-biodegradable to biodegradable (easily digestible by sea animals). This strategy is vital for brands that always package everything they sell using fancy bags.
• Educate the customers about the bags; show them statistics and why your brand had to change to digestible packaging. Educating them will help make the switch easy.

2. Move Away from Plastic Straws

What makes plastic straws more dangerous is their tiny size and how it can quickly build up in quantity. According to a report by Surfers Against Sewage there are approximately 51 trillion microplastics pieces out there, a category “plastic straws” fit into.

Plastic straws are more dangerous because they are small in size, and are easily mistaken for food by ocean animals — and they’re sadly non-digestible.

“There are 500 million straws being used everyday in the US.,” New York Councilman Rafael L. Espinal Jr., said in the wake of a bill that’ll ban the use of plastic straws in all bars and restaurants in the Big Apple. “That’s enough straw to fill Yankee Stadium five times over.”

What Your Brand can do:

• Ban the use of straw within the company environment and bring in a healthy eco-friendly alternative.
• Educating staff about the detriments of straws will help form a conscious eco-friendly organizational habit that will cascade into their individual lives. Utilize wall posters, graffiti's and seminars to teach them how the normal ways they dispose some items is causing problems for sea animals.

3. Purposefully Recycle Wastes

Our brand can contribute to cleaning the oceans and ridding our environment of wastes by recycling them and probably infusing them in our products. Starting from the plastic wastes from the company’s cafeteria to the major waste gotten from the product creation process — all of these can be recycled properly.

The core question should be is my company recycling and reusing these wastes in a manner that’ll benefit the planet? The length of your answer will determine how helpful your brand is to the save the planet course.

We have a lot of brands doing that so beautifully.

Allbirds is a shoe company that makes shoes from sheep wool. They make their shoe laces from recycled bottles. Its packaging material is over 90% recycled cardboard.

Awake watches is a wrist watch company founded by two french entrepreneurs that utilize recycled wastes from the ocean to manufacture their watches.

Pentatonic is a furniture company that make their furniture products from consumer trash. The beautiful part of Pentatonic is that they can recycle its own products into diverse new products at the end of the product’s useful life.

What Your Brand can do:

• Crosscheck your production processes and see areas where you waste products parts that could be easily recycled. Most of these recycling will save your company huge amount of money in new purchase.
• Re-channel the way you dispose major wastes that cause harm to the ocean. Instead of sending them to the ocean, brainstorm on major ways to smartly process for safer-ocean friendly disposal.

4. Have Earth Friendly Work Culture

Brands everywhere need to remind themselves, staffs, customers etc., that the earth makes it possible for them to do business in the first place.

How do you convey this crucial question?

It’s simple. Sit down and crosscheck your brand’s work culture. If the current culture is epileptic, it can be cured.

Many companies are already jumping ship and drastically changing their anti-earth processes. Aranyani is an Earth conscious fashion brand that uses its designs to remind brands to reroute their work culture to reflect an allegiance with earth’s beauty.

Your brand can identify with the earth by changing work culture that aren’t 21st century material. Changing culture requires work. Human are easily taken to tradition — doing things a particular way — but with consistency any toxic habit can be changed.

What Your Brand can do:

• Initiate change with incentives. The board and staff will easily catch on when every earth changes they do come with a price attached to it. Organizational habits sprout faster when positive reinforcements are adhered to.
• Re-construct the the vision/mission statements to show value for life. A life conscious business won’t foster ways to kill the earth.