SOLVE THE OCEAN PLASTICS CRISIS?

This is a true crisis that impacts everyone on this planet.

Over 10 million metric tons of Plastic goes Into the ocean each year. The plastic in the ocean wears down to become microplastics, and is now in our food and is even being found in our mountain streams through evaporation and precipitation. Plastic has recently been confirmed as a global health crisis and highly dangerous to humans and to animals at every stage. An article that came out Dec 3, 2019th unveils a study that shows Microplastics a million times more abundant in the ocean than previously thought. Read more about the severity of this crisis in National Geographic's Planet Or Plastic feature. It’s raining plastic in the Rocky Mountains and Falling Out Of the Sky With Snow in the Arctic. Discovery raises new questions about the amount of plastic waste permeating the air, water, and soil virtually everywhere on Earth - and in our bodies.

In May 2019, the 1st annual Ocean Plastics Leadership Summit was organized on a boat in the Atlantic Ocean at one of the plastics gyres in the Sargasso Sea.

160 executives from corporate and NGO organizations came together to work on accelerating solutions for the global ocean plastics crisis. Soul Buffalo, a transformative expeditions company led by Dave Ford put this audacious idea in motion. HATCH was proud to be lead on program design, facilitation, and the Design Labs, driving to actionable outcomes.

Companies representing $248 BILLION in aggregate revenue participated. Three OF THE TOP five largest consumer packaging goods companies in the world (Nestle, Procter & Gamble, & Coca Cola), as well as Clorox (Burt’s Bees, Brita, Glad), Colgate-Palmolive, GE, Hasbro, HP, Kimberly-Clark, SAP, in addition to many of the most well respected NGO’s on the planet, including 5 Gyres, Greenpeace International, National Geographic, Ocean Conservancy, Closed Loop Partners, World Wildlife Fund, and more came together to work on accelerating solutions to this global crisis.

It wasn’t just talk. The Design Labs pushed the group to make actionable commitments, and create initiatives, new ideas, and curate collaborations to work on solving this crisis.

Toy inventor of the year / HATCHer David Yakos stood up at the Ocean Plastics Leadership Summit and told the room (including a woman from Hasbro) that he was going to make elimination of plastics packaging part of his non-negoriables. Three months later, Hasbro commits to remove plastics from packaging.

Additional outcomes lead to a coalition to form called Zero Hero, with Clorox, Nestle, Kimberly Clark, and more. In September, SAP launched on a plastics cloud, and Kimberly-Clark has committed to removing plastic from wet wipes and diapers, etc., within the next two years. Huge progress. Watch this video.

Led by HATCH, with support from IDEO, the solutions-driven Design Labs process was modeled after the HATCH Labs. To mine this potential, the Summit programmed in a set of dedicated design labs to unlock the full potential of the visionary thinking on board the ship. These Design labs were not only set up to foster breakthrough ideas, but were with the expectation that each team would outline actionable roadmaps with 30/60/90 day game plans to help manifest those ideas soon after the Summit was complete. Consider HATCH and customized HATCH Labs when your organization requires assistance in sparking break-throughs, via innovative idea generation and iteration in order to accelerate solutions for and an actionable roadmap.

HATCHer Dave Ford, Founder of SoulBuffalo Expeditions and our fearless leader had a brilliant vision and tapped the HATCH network to help make it a transformative and actionable experience. Roshi Givechi (creative director/facilitator) was amazing, working tirelessly with Dave and I on design and execution of the summit, along with innovative out of the box thinkers, HATCHers Aithan Shapira (MIT professor/Founder Making to Think), David Delgado (NASA/JPL), David Yakos (Toy inventor of the year, Co-Founder of Salient), Tom Gruber (inventor of Siri and underwater photographer), activist/artist Benjamin Von Wong, Lauren Turk (musician / activist), Jared Silverman (Director of Development HATCH, Director of Gwydion Fund, Freya Williams (Author of Green Giants), and Genevieve Ennis Hume (co-founder Implikit) came together to create magic, and help co-facilitate the Design Labs.

HATCH's collaboration on these Labs with Lauren Yarmuth of IDEO, Julia Novy-Hildesley of Stanford, and Todd Barker + John Ehrmann of Meridian Institute was extremely powerful and inspiring.

CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT THE OUTCOMES and highlights of the roadmap to actionable solutions.

#StopOceanPlastics #SouBuffalo #OceanPlasticsLeadershipSummit #HATCHaBetterWorld