Pharrell Williams and G-Star RAW Present RAW For the Oceans
I’ve got “Happy” stuck in my head as I type…little did I know that singer Pharrell Williams is the creative director for a company called Bionic Yarn, which produces fabrics out of recycled plastics. This would have made a great addition to my post awhile back about sustainability in the fashion world. But I digress…we’ve all seen the media surrounding our increasingly polluted oceans and the swirling loads of floating garbage, otherwise known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch“, that nobody seems to be doing anything about even though we all know about its unnerving ramifications to wildlife as well as the planet as a whole. This is where The Vortex Project comes into play, constantly looking for innovative ways to bring that garbage back where it belongs: recycled back into things we can actually use. G-Star RAW and Bionic Yarn are working with The Vortex Project to use some of that plastic to create a special new denim line called RAW For the Oceans.
I am not a fanatic or a hard-core activist. I’m not the guy with the picket sign or the guy who lays down on tracks, but I commend them for their conviction. I have a lot to be thankful for, all of the cool things that have happened in my life. We have to give back in some shape and form and that’s giving back to the Earth. I’ve been lucky enough to be given this collaboration and my message to people is you don’t have to do anything. But if you don’t want to let it go, then what Bionic is doing with the oceans is right for you. – Pharrell in National Geographic
How will the garbage be collected? In an interview with National Geographic, Pharrell explains “The PET bottles are collected from the coastlines after washing in from the ocean. We’re also in the early stages of developing technology to recover plastic in the open ocean.” I for one am glad to see someone doing something about this, in one of my favorite industries…denim! I hope to do a review of these when they are released in mid-August