I recently had the privilege of interviewing Becky Irish, the Managing Director of Ocean Bottle, a company dedicated to combating ocean plastic pollution through innovative reusable water bottles. Founded with a mission to turn the tide on environmental waste, Ocean Bottle funds the collection of 11.4 kg of ocean-bound plastic—equivalent to 1,000 plastic bottles—with every sale, partnering with organisations like Plastic Bank to support coastal communities and sustainable practices. In our conversation, Becky shared her insights on leading a purpose-driven business and the impact Ocean Bottle continues to make in the fight for cleaner oceans.
1. Why is conserving and protecting the oceans important to you?
There are plenty of carbon projects based on land, but the funding to projects in the ocean is relatively small and that I find mad! because, the ocean is our largest carbon sink. But the way that it sinks carbon is through plankton in the ocean that's sequestering it for us. Now that there is so much plastic in the ocean, they're starting to eat microplastics instead and they're dying. So, they're losing the ability to sequester carbon for us and that is threatening the ocean's ability to be a carbon sink for us. So, if we have any hope of fighting climate change, to me, we have to start protecting our ocean better.
2. What are you doing that is better for the oceans?
When I was managing director of Ocean Co, I led a brilliant team that were on a mission to stop plastic from reaching the ocean. So Ocean Co was born out of 'Ocean Bottle', which as a consumer facing brand is often a little better known, where every reusable bottle sold would collect a thousand plastic bottles worth of ocean bound plastic weight. And the idea behind Ocean Co was simply that this could be something attached to any product and service. So it didn't matter whether it was a reusable bottle, like with Ocean Bottle, it could be a coffee, it could be an event ticket, anything at all could fund plastic collection. Through Ocean Co, we helped a number of organisations from Grind Coffee to Goldman Sachs to Aqualibra to fund plastic collection through their business.
3. What do you think the surfing industry specifically can be doing to support the health of the oceans?
People tend to protect what they love. You know, you love your family, you want to protect them. And surfing helps people fall in love
with the ocean very organically. I can sit here and talk about geeky ocean plankton, but that's not gonna resonate with that many people. Surfing is gonna resonate with far, far more people. So the more that the surfing industry can do to get people in the ocean, loving the ocean, understanding how important it is, the more that the message from the likes of myself and others that the ocean is under threat is going to land. So if you can help us get people to fall in love with the ocean, that would be amazing.
4. Can you recommend any books, brands, organisations or people our followers should check out for inspiration?
I would recommend that you get on the Ocean Bottle book club! So once a month the Ocean Bottle team share a book, a podcast, a documentary,
something that's resonating with the team on the ocean, ocean health and ocean impact. It comes in an email so that's probably a mailing list you actually want to be on!
Sign up here: https://oceanbottle.co/pages/ob-book-club
5. Any final message you would like to share? (Don’t stress if you can’t think of any!)
I would say that it can be quite depressing talking about sustainability and ocean health and it can feel very disheartening when we think about our individual actions and worrying if they're actually making a difference. I would say that through my work at Ocean Bottle and Ocean Co I truly saw the power of collective action and how you know all those individuals that bought a reusable bottle with Ocean Bottle or one of our clients products on the Ocean Co. side, that has all added up to now over a billion plastic bottles worth of ocean bound plastic weight having been collected. So all those individual actions that might have felt small have added up to something that is truly an enormous impact. So my message would be keep going, do the little things and collectively we can make a difference.
Connect with Beck on Linkedin HERE
