Series 9 has arrived! Our first guest is Cyrill Gutsch, the fascinating founder of Parley for the Oceans. With his partner Lea Stepken, this NY-based former product designer and branding expert started his global environmental organisation in 2012, after bumping into Pamela Anderson at an art fair.
Pammy was wearing a Sea Shepherd T-shirt, and when Cyrill asked her why, she told him Sea Shepherd’s activist-in-chief Paul Watson was in trouble - he’d been arrested in Frankfurt on an international warrant. Cyrill, being German, thought he might be able to help, and went to visit Watson in a lawyer’s office. There, he learned that Watson’s strife was a drop in the proverbial compared with the oceans’ problems. Plastic pollution! Climate change! Overfishing! Could creativity be the super power needed to turn it around?
The rest, as they say, is history. Cyrill decided to ditch his regular clients, and donate his time to just one: the big blue. Specifically, raising awareness around the “beauty and fragility” of our oceans and “collaborating on projects [to] end their destruction.”
Over the years, such projects have included: working with Adidas to phase out single-use plastics; partnering with big-name visual artists on everything from underwater sculptures to sustainable surfboards; funding research into new materials; and setting up programs in schools. On a practical level, Parley’s work is just as likely to play out as beach cleanups in the Maldives as it is to be a new Dior bag. It’s all in the mix, to beat what Cyrill calls “our addiction” to virgin plastic.
Next on his To-Do List? Just a total materials revolution. “We need to change the way we make stuff.”
Cyrill with Paul Watson in 2020.
CAPTAIN PAUL WATSON is the Canadian-American environmental activist who founded the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in 1977 to protect marine wildlife. He started protecting nature early on. “At age nine he would seek out and destroy leghold traps that were set by beaver hunters, interfere with deer and duck hunters, and foil the attempts of other young boys to shoot birds. In the late 1960s he joined the Canadian Coast Guard and gained sailing experience with the merchant marines. An early member of Greenpeace, Watson often employed daring and innovative tactics to defend wildlife from hunters, such as positioning his inflatable Zodiac boat between a pod of sperm whales and the harpoon of a Soviet whaling vessel or forcing sealing ships to a halt by standing on the ice in their path.” Via Enyclopedia Britannica.
Cyrill describes him thus: “He’s an environmentalist by heart and he would die for a whale. In his opinion, the camera is the true weapon against the destruction of our oceans.” Oh, and yes, PAMELA ANDERSON is a long-time supporter of Sea Shepherd. She joined the organisation’s Media and Arts Advisory Board in January 2015. More here.
In 2012, Cyrill decided to turn his genius problem solving skills as a design thinker to working exclusively for CLIENT OCEAN.
Learn more about the issue of OCEAN PLASTIC POLLUTION here.
Parley MALDIVES “works directly with local groups and island communities to strengthen existing conservation efforts and introduce new programs where necessary. They are currently focused on implementing Parley AIR, intercepting and recycling plastic waste and educating the next generation.” Read all about it here.
BIOAVAILABILITY means the degree to which a pollutant can be taken up by a living thing. We used to talk about this concept mostly in relation to drugs, but these days it’s the bioavailability of microplastics that has folks worried. According to Science Direct: “Current literature shows that microplastic ingestion has been recorded in 39 zooplankton species from 28 taxonomic orders.” Yikes, right?
Clare says we’re ingesting, on average, the equivalent of one credit card’s worth of plastic every week. That’s scary but true data from the Australian Microplastics Assessment Project. See here.
“TO BE VERY HONEST, I DON'T BELIEVE THAT WE'RE GOING TO CLEAN UP THE OCEANS," is a quote from an interview Cyrill gave to Dezeen magazine. “My personal opinion is that the ultimate end of marine plastic pollution is not in cleaning up," he said. "It's a very good conversation starter, it's a very good way to raise awareness of the problem, it's a way to raise funds if you're making products [out of ocean plastic] so the product, not the material itself, is a fundraiser". But? Read the rest here.
BRAND PARTNERSHIPS Parley x ADIDAS announced their first “ecoinnovation” collab in 2015, and they’ve been working together ever since . That first concept shoe, the Ultra Boost, featured an upper made of “yarns and filaments reclaimed and recycled from ocean waste and illegal deep-sea gillnets”.
They say: “The fishing gear was once used in poaching operations exploiting vulnerable toothfish species in the Southern Ocean. Parley partner Sea Shepherd retrieved over 72 km of illegal gillnet and fishing line during Operation Icefish, a record-breaking campaign to stop the ‘Bandit 6’ poaching vessels plundering under-patrolled, remote waters. The nets were abandoned by the notorious poaching vessel Thunder, which was later intentionally scuttled off the coast of West Africa following a 110-day chase by Sea Shepherd vessels.”
Want to know how Parley is working with DIOR? Try this article on Forbes.
Images: Dior x Parley for the Oceans
RECYCLING Cyrill says that all this helped make recycling sexy, and that fashion people used to recoil at the idea of embracing used materials. In an ideal world, we’d wean ourselves off plastics entirely, but since that’s unrealistic right now: ”WE SHOULD NOT USE VIRGIN PLASTIC. WE SHOULD ONLY USE RECYCLED PLASTIC, IF IT’S PLASTIC WE’RE GOING TO USE.” Word.
Hence, the need for a NEW MATERIALS FUTURE. This, he says, will likely take the form of a mix of planet-friendly NATURAL SOLUTIONS and BIOFABRICATIONS. Cyrill describes the latter as “learning from the engine room of nature”. Hold your horses though, it’s not happening overnight. It “will take decades” but we have to start now.
The innovations that Parley is currently backing include, mentioned by Cyrill on the podcast, include:
BANANATEX “The world’s first durable, technical fabric made purely from the naturally grown Abacá banana plants. Cultivated in the Philippine highlands within a natural ecosystem of sustainable mixed agriculture and forestry, the plant is self-sufficient, requires no pesticides, fertilizer or extra water.” Discover here.
BIOMASON promises to revolutionise the building industry by switching out concrete for a biotech material that emulates how coral reefs build their structures. Fascinating! There’s a fashion link too - imagine the shops of the future being built from this. Discover here.
AIR COMPANY is revolutionising the drinks industry with its vodka derived from captured C02. Say what? “Distilling alcohol the old fashioned way not only releases its emissions, but it uses a lot of water — about 35 liters of water to make one liter of distillate. Air Vodka is made of just two ingredients, CO2 and water. It separates hydrogen out of the water through electrolysis, releasing the oxygen. The hydrogen is then fed into a “carbon conversion reactor” system with the captured CO2. That creates ethanol which, when combined with water, becomes a type of vodka.” Via CNBC.
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