earthDECKS Limelights: Companies to Watch

Sportsmanship, Tourism, and Media

Three Key concepts:

1) recycled plastic in
• clothing
• water bottles

2) reducing plastic use in
• hotels and restaurants
• travel and entertainment

3) Using business leadership media to
• raise awareness
• fund accelerators/ incubators

Adidas has launched their third collection of shoes made from upcycled ocean plastic. The German sportswear brand has teamed up with yoga lifestyle brand Wanderlust to launch an ocean-inspired yoga collection, with each piece made out of recycled ocean plastic.

Adidas’ 42-piece collection includes crop tops, bomber jackets, printed leggings and onesies, all inspired by the ocean, with each piece using recycled materials – including Parley Ocean Plastic fabric, combining ocean plastic and Adidas’ performance technology.

Adidas is at the cutting edge, not only in using recycled plastic material, but also in harnessing sophisticated supply chain technology, both in-house and third-party manufacturing automation. Manufacturing jobs are notoriously vulnerable to being outsourced to developing countries where labor costs are cheaper.

Adidas has cleverly taken advantage of dropping industrial robot costs to bring manufacturing bases closer to the site of demand. Chinese T-shirt manufacturer Tianyuan Garments Company is opening a factory in Arkansas that will use machine vision-based sewing robots developed by Georgia-based startup SoftWear Automation to manufacture apparel for Adidas. Tainyuan will employ 400 workers at $14/hr at its new garment factory in Little Rock, Arkansas, starting in 2018. Adidas is featured by CB Insights in Retail’s Adapt-Or-Die Moment: How Artificial Intelligence Is Reshaping Commerce.

Although the plant is creating some retail jobs, its core manufacturing tasks will be heavily automated. Cotton On Group is not only making a difference by making clothing from cotton, rather than polyester. The company has committed to go bag-free by the end of 2018.

Loop Industries, the Terrebonne, Canada-based waste and recycling technology company, has partnered with Evian, the Paris-based global spring water brand, to create all of Evian’s plastic bottles out of 100 percent recycled plastic by 2025.

Travel and Food (from Marriott to McDonald’s)

In what has been dubbed “the last straw” the Marriott Hotel Group, the world’s largest hotel chain, is removing plastic straws from all 60 of its properties in Britain — including some of London’s best known five-star destinations, such as the Sant Pancras Hotel shown below. This is the latest victory for the Standard’s Last Straw campaign.

McDonald’s UK is phasing out plastic straws in some of its restaurants.

The News & Entertainment Industry

Sky UK (formerly British Sky Broadcasting Limited, BSkyB and Sky) is a telecommunications company providing television and broadband Internet services, fixed line and mobile telephone services to consumers and businesses in the United Kingdom — the UK’s largest pay-TV broadcaster. Sky’s decision to invest £25m to fight the plastic crisis highlighted by BBC’s hit nature show Blue Planet II, may seem like a drop in the bucket, but its pledges are setting an example for other companies. Sky UK has produced several powerful calls to action:

This short film is complemented by a longer film, A PLASTIC TIDE, with powerful footage showing how ocean plastic has impacted Mumbai, India.

A decade ago, the global telecoms giant became the world’s first carbon neutral media company, had raised £9m to protect the Amazon rainforest, and was the first FTSE 100 company to commit to being single-use-plastic-free by 2020.

Fred Michel, group director of Sky Ocean Ventures.

To find great moonshot innovation,” Fred Michel, the group director of Sky Ocean Ventures told Forbes, Sky is launching an Innovators in Residence program to offer startups the chance to test their products at Sky’s London campus,” from which businesses can also go on to receive funding.

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Saving Our Oceans from Plastic: articles by Zann Gill

• Adverse Health Effects of Plastic
  
• Aquaria – Informal Learning Network
• Beat the Microbead
• Bibliography: Plastic Roads
• Boyan Slat: Floater Technology for Ocean Cleanup
• Complex Systems Problems
• Cradle to Grave: Plastic Supply Chain
• Dame Ellen MacArthur: The Circular Economy
• Sylvia Earle: Learning for a Plastic World
• Enshrouded in Plastic   
• Flamingos Signal the Future We Face
• Floating Trash: More than 4x as bad as we thought
• Give the World a Helping Hand: 3D Prostheses
• Global Ocean Sensing
• Industry Response to the Plastic Challenge
• Nature’s Innovators: plastic consumers
• Ocean Debris Network
• Ocean Ingenuity
• Oceans – Measuring Planet Health
• Plastic Bank – The Exchange Economy
• Plastic – Climate Change Connection: Israel & UBQ
• PLASTIC: Complex Systems Problem
• Plastic: Drinking Water, Table Salt & Mother’s Milk
• Plastic Footprint – Carbon Footprint
• Plastic-Eating Enzyme
• Plastic Gyres and Social Justice
• Plastic Impact Calculator
• Plastic Pollution Coalition: Campaign vs Single Use Plastic
• Plastic & Public Health: Endocrine Disruptors
• PLASTIC: Overview of National Leadership
• Plastic Roads – Global Innovation Ecosystem
• Plastic – The Circular Economy
• The Plasticene
• Plastiki: adventure stories & a big message
• Raising Awareness of Plastic Hazards