Clean Up The Oceans By Buying Plastic Shorts?

Riz Smith, who has been variously described as a designer, gentleman surfer and conservationist, has come up with an idea to rid the oceans of plastic litter. He’s going to turn your Evian bottle into designer boardshorts. On his website, Riz states: 

Umm... Bees?

Our mission is to make beautiful boardshorts for a beautiful plastic-free ocean.  Experts estimate that there are 46,000 pieces of plastic in every square mile of the ocean. We don't want our shorts to end up littering landfills or oceans. So, in an effort to do our part, we’ve developed the Rizcycling programme.

Rizcycling means working with our customers to create a perpetual loop that transforms waste and worn out swimwear into beautiful new products.  

We will be working with our partners The Marine Conservation Society in 2015 to hold 10 Riz-sponsored beach clean-ups that gather 25,000 pieces of beach plastic.

Our ultimate aspiration is to turn ocean and beach plastics, the water bottles that end up floating in the sea or littering beaches, into beautiful shorts

We are working with fabric manufacturers and other brands to figure out how this process can work, so that by 2016 our first short can be made from ocean plastics.

Riz Smith, through his contacts with The Marine Conservation Society will collect loads of plastic bottles from the oceans and make them into boardshorts. We, the customers, will then buy the shorts and when they wear out or we tire of the style, we’ll hand them back to Riz in return for a discount on another pair. Closed loop recycling as Riz calls it.

Riz's closed loop system

That sounds like a brilliant idea. Buy some shorts and the oceanic plastic problem is solved. Now if Riz makes a yellow and blue bikini the Ukrainian issue will be solved too!

The thing is, after pondering a bit, we started to see some flaws in the idea.

Firstly lets look at the numbers. On his website Riz mentions that experts estimate (the word expert and the word estimate used together can easily be read as: some blokes say) that there are 46,000 pieces of plastic in every square mile of the ocean. 

Seriously! In every square mile? That doesn’t sound right to us.

Wouldn’t it be better to say that: if you separate out all the plastic in the ocean into equal square mile sections, there would be 46,000 pieces in every section – at a guess. (Sorry but one of us is very pedantic about statistics) To make a start on this vast mountain, Riz is going to organise 10 sponsored beach clean-ups this year that will gather 25,000 pieces of plastic. That’s not even one square mile of ocean sorted out, but never mind 10 beaches get cleaned and that’s a good thing, but who is doing all this collecting? Are beach clean-ups going to be the way that the company gets it’s raw materials if so will it be yearly sponsored collections? Will the collectors eventually be paid?

The reason we ask, is that imagine that Riz’s idea takes off, imagine he starts making some serious money. Would you give your free time in order to provide a cost free labour source for a profit making business? And what if the collections are taking place, not in the UK or rich western countries but poorer ones? Are the citizens of those countries going to be asked to do the collecting for nothing? Eventually, someone, somewhere is going to want to see some money for all the effort.

The 5 Ocean Gyres where plastic accumulates

Another problem is that most of the oceans plastic is not in fact littering beaches. Instead it is floating in huge Gyres the largest of which, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, contains around 1/3 of all oceanic plastic. So even if you did clean up all the beaches in the UK or even the world, you won’t have cleared a fraction of the circulating oceanic plastic.

An even bigger issue with this is that Riz doesn’t seem to have solved the issue of how he is actually going to turn oceanic plastic into boardshorts. In his own words, it remains an aspiration and that’s why he is currently running a crowdfunding campaign to raise the funds so that he can work with manufacturers and others to see how the process will work. Umm… !

Despite this issue, Riz has set a target of 2016 for the first boardshorts to be made from recycled ocean plastic. What if this aspiration can’t be achieved? What if the manufacturers think it is economically unviable or just that the manufacture of such items is unfeasible. 

 

Riz currently sells his boardshorts, made from recycled fabric, for £80 a pop. Now that’s pretty pricey for a pair of recycled shorts and there is no reason to assume that those made from plastic are going to be cheaper. Obviously Riz might be going for a bit of exclusivity in his branding, a sort of snob value for the denizens of Hampstead and Notting Hill and he might not be remotely interested in mass marketing to the rest of us. Which does tend to raise another possibility. He might not sell very many shorts at all. So all that collected plastic will have to be turned into something else – like bottles for instance.

Of course we don’t imagine for one minute that Riz Smith is not a genuine guy, genuinely thinking about new and imaginative ideas to promote ocean conservation and he may have seen an opportunity to create a sustainable business model. After all the Great Ocean Clean Up project (the most successful crowdfunding project in history) has published their feasibility study on cleaning up the ocean gyres and maybe Riz has realised that if they are successful in 2019, there’s going to be a lot of plastic available for recycling.

Any idea that promotes the preservation of the ocean environment, or actually does something about it, is always to be welcomed and there are a great many organisations out there doing great things.

However, this particular idea has been making us argue between ourselves so much that our beer went flat. Conservation and business rarely mix; when money and profit become involved the lines become very blurry indeed. Add to that fact, that despite our hopes that Riz is onto something, we get a sense that this is a bit gimmicky, a bit fashion world tokenism that generates sales by playing on middle class guilt. Sure you drive a petrol guzzling 4X4 and chuck away more rubbish than the population of Timbuktu but don’t worry, just buy a pair of Riz Smith’s boardshorts and a bag for life and the Karma is balanced. So no matter how well intentioned, this idea seems to be really nothing more than a good selling point for Riz’s boardshorts and we doubt it will do anything to deal with the problem except maybe to highlight the issue at the odd dinner party in London. If you fancy a pair plastic shorts then be our guest, but if you truly want to help with the conservation of the ocean - get involved or donate to these organisations below. And If you see anyone chucking a plastic bottle into the ocean, do what we do - chuck them in after it!

 

Project Aware

Marine Conservation Society

The Ocean Clean Up Project