Clean up the Ocean this Black Friday

Ahh Black Friday. Is there a more divisive date in the holiday calendar?

It’s a heady mix of dubiously generous discounts (we’re looking at you, big faceless toothbrush brands!), daring PR stunts and a hefty dose of FOMO.

We’re not going to switch off the website for the day, or try to rebrand it “Green Friday”. We always want to promote conscious consumption, and if we can cut through the Black Friday chaos and encourage people to choose a more sustainable option this year – why not??

We want to create a world where our daily rituals are in harmony with the planet, and if we want to win the war on plastic we need to pick our battles.

With that in mind, we’re super happy to announce that we’re donating 5% of all our Black Friday profits to the amazing team at The Ocean Cleanup.

SURI x The Ocean Cleanup

The work they’re doing at The Ocean Cleanup is too impressive to ignore. To date they have extracted over 1,843,624kg of trash from our oceans and they’ve set themselves the ambitious goal of removing 90% of all floating ocean plastic by 2040.

Founded in 2013 by the lively Boyan Slat, their process is two-fold.

• 1. Clean up the legacy pollution that has already accumulated in the ocean
• 2. ‘Turn off the tap’ to help prevent more waste ending up in our rivers and flowing into our oceans.

Their philosophy is to learn as they go and iterate their way towards success. They’ve already rigorously mapped out the plastic problem and developed a series of innovative vessels to gather it all up.

Fancy feeling inspired (but also a bit angry at the amount of plastic in our oceans)? Give this a watch.

You can keep track of their progress ‘live’ on their dashboard but also over on their TikTok channel. If you enjoy watching enormous swathes of plastic being removed from the ocean, it’s pretty satisfying – the new ASMR!