OUR SEA-SATIONAL PARTNERSHIP WITH SEVEN CLEAN SEAS!

Our partnership with Seven Clean Seas has been a match made in aquatic heaven. They’re an organisation dedicated to turning the tide on our ocean’s health, recovering plastic, and helping to preserve marine environments. They’re building a community committed to challenging the status quo - the perfect partner for us Bros. We needed a partner on the ground, and in the water(!), collecting the equivalent weight of two plastic bottles for every Lo Bros sold in the UK. The moment we met founders Tom and Ben, we knew it was meant to be.

Seven Clean Seas remove the plastic by building clean-up projects in some of the world’s most heavily plastic polluted areas, initially focused in Indonesia. One of the things we love most about Seven Clean Seas is their treatment of people. They employ locals to make up their clean-up crews, many of whom had lost their tourism-related jobs during Covid-19. All their employees have formal employment contracts that abide by local labour laws, and they receive social security benefits, paid holidays and paid maternity leave.

Seven Clean Seas have two main projects, the first is on Bintan Island (home to over 350,000 people) which has several marine protected areas and is a marine biodiversity hotspot. Tragically the island is highly polluted by marine plastic due to insufficient waste management infrastructure leading to plastic spilling directly into marine environments. Their second project is in Batam Island, home to 1.2 million people. Here the lack of waste management services means that plastic collects and pools underneath everyone’s water-top houses with the tides.

So…two ambitious clean-up projects! Ones that Lo Bros were keen to be part of. Our partnership works like this: We deliver quarterly payments to Seven Clean Seas, which reflects the number of Lo Bros bought by you in the UK. They use this payment to help fund their projects in Bintan and Batam Islands, removing the equivalent weight of two carbonated PET bottles from our oceans on behalf of Lo Bros for each can or bottle sold in the UK. So sea-imple! To read more about Seven Clean Seas and their holistic approach to fixing the broken system and reducing ocean bound plastics for good click the link below!

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We’re now a Net Zero Plastic Brand

Let’s cheers to that

We’ve partnered with Plastic Collective, a leading global player creating circular economies for plastic and over the past year we’ve been actively working together to reduce our plastic footprint. Our supply and production teams have worked closely with the Plastic Collective conducting a plastic audit that measured Lo Bros annual plastic footprint globally. Since then, we have been busy phasing out all avoidable plastic, plus offsetting all remaining unavoidable plastic use through the Plastic Collective credit programs.

At Lo Bros our plastic reduction initiatives have seen us pledge never to use plastic as primary packaging for any Lo Bros product. We have redesigned our previously plastic-based labels to paper-based ones which will begin to appear in market from July 2023.

Further afield, via the Plastic Collective we’re supporting an impressive community-empowerment collection and recycling project ‘Closing the Loop in Accra, Ghana’ to offset our remaining unavoidable plastic use. This project sees small recycling plants created as social enterprises in some of the poorest communities where plastic pollution is severe, enabling women to build their own plastic waste collection businesses. Raising awareness about recycling and empowering women to start their own businesses has seen over 80 jobs created with a sustainable source of income and on-going employment. As a consequence of this partnership Lo Bros has been recognised as a Net Zero Plastic Brand. We are both Net Zero Plastic Collected and Recycled.

Don’t stop us now! We also have big plans for the future.

Our passionate team continue to stay up to date with best-in-class innovation in order to steer the improvement of our plastic footprint. This will allow us to further eliminate or substitute plastic as we find new capabilities that allow us to do so. We’ll be increasing recycled content across secondary and tertiary packaging (this is plastic used in the distribution of our products such as shrink wrap which we don’t currently have a solution or replacement for). While we’re doing everything we can to keep plastic where it should be, we acknowledge there are volumes of plastic that are likely to enter the environment and likely to remain unrecycled - so Lo Bros will use plastic credits in the short and medium term to compensate for this. We have committed to offsetting this plastic leakage for the next 3 years while working with the Plastic Collective to establish medium and long term strategies to create circular plastic systems and hopefully one day, the removal of plastic from our entire business.

Last but not least, we’ll be conducting another plastic audit in July 2024 to review the impact of our offset and reduce initiatives from 2023. This work with the Plastic Collective plus our work with Seven Clean Seas collecting two plastic bottles for every Lo Bros sold in the UK shows Lo Bros commitment to going above and beyond our own plastic footprint. We’re not only reducing and mitigating our own plastic use, we’re trying to fix the industry wide soda problem of billions of plastic bottles entering our oceans every year.