World Ocean Day 2022: Here's What You Can Do To Help

Even though are oceans are in need of protection all year round, today is officially World Ocean Day! This is a date dedicated to celebrating our incredible oceans and drawing more focus to the need to conserve and protect our blue planet!

Many individuals and organisations are calling for more action to restore our oceans and prevent further harm to marine wildlife, including S’wheat! Join in and become one of the many companies contributing to the fight against ocean destruction.

Back in 1992, the oceans institute proposed to begin a yearly event called “World Ocean Day” at the Global Forum in Rio de Janeiro. Finally, in 2008, the United Nations General Assembly issued a resolution recognising June 8th as the official World Oceans Day. Many exciting events will take place throughout June 8th, from webinars and workshops which will inspire and educate on a range of topics from deep-sea exploration to marine-science, to the issues that are critical to our oceans today such as marine plastics and microplastics. Now is the time to spare even five minutes to learn about the biggest threats to our oceans, and how we, individually or as part of a larger organisation can make a big impact through small changes. 

We are all guilty of going through day-to-day life without really paying attention to the impacts that our daily actions can have on the world around us, especially if we do not often see these impacts affect us first hand. As a consequence of this, we remove ourselves from the problem and often do not take the time to understand the role the ocean plays in our daily life. The more we remove ourselves from the issue, the more we place ourselves at risk of harming marine ecosystems because we are simply unaware of the impact we create. World Ocean Day is the optimal time to remind ourselves of the critical functions the ocean delivers for our very own survival, no matter if your home is next to the beach or in the concrete jungle. Coral reefs, beaches and native wildlife attract tourism and help protect coastal communities from the long-lasting impacts of natural disasters, these reefs provide a natural barrier that protect the coasts from storms and wave destruction. In 2004’s Indian Ocean Tsunami researchers found that the most affected regions were lacking healthy coral reefs, whereas the least affected areas had abundant healthy coral reefs there to protect them. Human activities are continuously negatively impacting and interfering with the ocean’s natural functions. As we are all aware, the increase in the use of fossil fuels has created excessive amounts of greenhouse gases to be released into the atmosphere, CO2 being the largest emission released, alongside this we have seen overfishing, irresponsible tourism, poaching and wildlife capture, extractive activities for minerals and large amounts of pollution from microplastics/plastics and chemicals. Human errors and irresponsible actions have also led to a rise in sea temperature and the rising of sea levels, ice sheets in the polar cap are melting and fauna such as mangroves are dying out in these warmer, pollution filled waters. 

Our Ocean also works as a giant “carbon sink” which has absorbed almost half of all human produced carbon dioxide since the 15th century. This means that the ocean absorbs over four times the amount of CO2 that our Amazon rain forest can absorb, per year! After all the destruction the ocean has faced, our oceans are now losing their capability to absorb excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which has led us to the position we find ourselves in today, more and more wildlife species becoming extinct or being listed as endangered, coastal communities becoming forced to move inland due to rising sea levels and pollution, and very soon, a change to all of our lives, even on a daily scale. 

So, what can we do to make a change? Whilst the United Nations deliberate large scale projects and we all aim to become net zero, we the people, can begin our change on a smaller scale and create a positive impact that will clean our oceans, stop plastic and plant trees, all through one small purchase. 

Meet S’wheat. 

S’wheat are a certified social enterprise based in Scotland that create Plant-based reusable water bottles.  S’wheat will plant a trackable tree and remove 20lbs of ocean bound plastic per bottle sold, to give you an idea of how much plastic that is, imagine roughly 450 plastic bottles being scooped out of the ocean! The S’wheat bottle is made from plant waste materials. Due to this, S’wheat skips out on the need to use energy intensive manufacturing processes, in fact, S’wheat only uses 1/16th of the amount of energy that is needed to produce a steel water bottle. This means that less CO2 is created in the process, giving our oceans less CO2 to absorb in the first place. As S’wheat also plant a trackable tree with every order, they currently support restoration projects world-wide and have collected 2.5 tonnes of carbon emissions so far! Not only this, but S’wheat are officially offsetting more carbon than they produce, surpassing carbon neutrality and becoming carbon negative, meaning that when you purchase a S’wheat bottle you know for sure that you won’t be contributing to the negative impact CO2 has on our oceans. The S’wheat bottle doesn’t contain any nasty chemicals and naturally bio-degrades in landfill which means that our oceans will never be filled with floating S’wheat bottles, our fish will never consume micro-plastics, and we won’t need to worry about gulping down chemicals through our drinking water.

S'wheat offer a fantastic range of colours, and their bottles can be collaboratively branded, so whether you are a football team, corporation, or small business you can showcase your contribution to saving the oceans through purchasing your very own branded reusable water bottle. S’wheat offer a fantastic Ocean Blue colour that creates an extra eye-catching way to show how S’wheat takes inspiration from our incredible oceans, and how as a social enterprise they are dedicated to keeping our oceans beautifully blue. 

Let’s work together to save our oceans one S'wheat bottle at a time.

Happy World Ocean Day!