SOMWR’s first approach is apparel focused, meeting you and your friends at the street level. We are working together with Starboard, the World Sailing sustainability award-winning watersports brand, activating a well-proven Blue Tiki positive impact.
Being the best brand for the planet is our focus and we first look at how to protect fragile coastal areas. The mangrove trees live at the water’s edge, their strong roots, protect coastal villages from heavy storms and create a robust biosphere where dugongs, fish and even elephants thrive.
Each will have mangroves planted to retract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and each will have plastic waste from the ocean and beaches removed. There are 2 levels of activation, Ocean Hero and Climate Hero. For each Ocean Hero product, we plant 1 Mangrove + we collect 1.1 kg of beach/ ocean trash. For each Climate Hero product we plant 10 Mangroves + we collect 1.1 kg of beach/ ocean trash.
The trash is collected in an area from the ocean until the water’s edge on high tide.
Mangrove trees have been planted in the WIF Thor Heyerdahl Climate Park in Myanmar to absorb Starboard’s estimated emissions from 1994. We have since planted more than 1,000,000 mangrove trees for the company group.
While Starboard is 10X Climate Positive and a past Climate Positive brand, SOMWR and products are 10X Climate Positive right from the start.
In 2017 we set up the Plastic Offset Program , POP for short. The team has collected 350,000 kg of plastic waste from waters and beaches in the last years, providing them a good income. The collected plastic is going to a variety of recyclers and we start to use some of recycled plastic in our SUP products. Much of Starboard’s products are made from plastic, but we stopped single use plastic packaging. SOMWR however, offers only certified organic fabrics in their collections.
This transparent POP chart is always online. Our goal is however to help stop the tap on plastic pollution by promoting better packaging and asking for stricter regulations.
- We partnered with ICF on environmental projects making their main SUP events 10X Climate Positive.
- We support the Olympic iQFoiL class and help run their sustainability committee, while also making their main events 10X Climate positive until the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
- Starboard helped initiate an Environmental committee in the Joint Foreign Chamber of Commerce Thailand and explores introducing a tax reduction for companies that meet CO2 emission targets.
- We signed an MOU with SCG, one of the largest CO2 emitters in South East Asia to work on environmental issues.
- We invested to help create a one-year environmental curriculum program for schools around the world. The program is focused on letting kids explore their superpowers to solve today‘s environmental issues as a team. We are empowering kids to become “Ambassadors for the Planet”, finding solutions to challenges that the older generation is unable to solve.
- We developed SUP kids and Windsurf kids programs where youngsters learn about environmental challenges alongside water safety and their sports.
- We built several elementary schools in Myanmar, hosting 600 kids and also set up a medical clinic there.
SOMWR believes that each choice we make leaves an imprint on the planet. The actions we take and support should make us proud of our traces.