At The Green Carpet Fashion Awards, Tom Ford’s Plastic Innovation Prize doled out $1.2 million to help purify our oceans.
Despite fashion’s barrage of sustainability claims, almost half of this plastic that colonizes our oceans comes from thin-film polybags, 180 billion of which are used by the fashion industry each year. So, in 2020, fashion mainstay Tom Ford set out to alter our plastic habits via a partnership with the (heartbreakingly titled) non-profit Lonely Whale, which aims to “develop alternatives to problematic plastics, and create a mass community of people committed to a utopian future.”
The partnership came in the form of the TOM FORD Plastic Innovation Prize, a competition that challenges contestants to create ocean-friendly, biologically degradable alternatives to thin-film plastic (which is made from fossil fuels.)
This year, the winners were announced at the aptly titled Green Carpet Fashion Awards on March 9, an event dedicated to fashion’s sustainable initiatives, co-chaired by Cate Blanchett, Tom Ford, Viola Davis, Simu Liu, Simone Ashley, and friend of Mission Quannah Chasinghorse, among others.
Crowned this year’s winners are Sway, an American company offering seaweed-based compostable packaging; Indian company Zerocircle, which creates wildlife and ocean-safe packaging materials out of seaweed that will dissolve in the ocean post-use; and Notpla, a London-based start-up focussed on pioneering natural-membrane packaging using seaweed.
The prize was a colossal 1.2 million dollars divvied between cash and direct investment courtesy of TOM FORD BEAUTY, The Estée Lauder Companies, and Trousdale Ventures (the prize’s venture capital partner). The money will go towards enabling the winners to mass-produce their innovations.
Fashion is increasingly cognizant of its apocalyptic impact on marine life and is taking steps to remedy it. Chloé recently collaborated with Ocean Sole on a sandal constructed from discarded flip-flops found on Kenyan beaches, while Stella McCartney joined forces with Adidas for a collection made of recycled ocean plastic, but few go as far as Ford’s ambitious attempt to entirely replace the role of plastic bags in our lives.
“I started this Prize three years ago with a harrowing fear that the world our children would inherit would no longer be a livable one,” said Ford in his speech. “Our three winners have created truly viable alternatives – alternatives that, when scaled across markets and industries, will drastically change the course of the health of our planet.”
Images courtesy of Tom Ford.
