Going global
Starboard wants to engage the whole world to take action and take responsibility for their local waters and recently launched a social media campaign where they encourage everyone to collect trash on land, in the sand or on the water, snap a picture of it and post it on any social media with the hashtag #StarboardWorldCleanup. Some cool prizes will be handed out to ten randomly selected participants, and one lucky winner will receive an inflatable SUP board and a two-piece Balsa Carbon paddle. The SUP community has embraced this challenge, and photos are being uploaded from around the globe. However, despite global cleanup efforts, the cruel reality is that trash will continue to make its way into nature if the flood of litter is not stopped. The greatest of these offenders is single-use plastic. Starboard met up with the founders of Bye Bye Plastic Bags, 16-year-old Melati and 14-year-old Isabel from Bali, who managed to get the single-use plastic bag banned on their island. “What’s somebody going to do about it?”, Melati asks in the BBPV video later telling us that we have to remember that it starts with one person. Melati and Isabel are that “one person” – or in this case one pair of sisters – as they succeeded in their crusade to have single-use plastic bags banned on Bali.
Starboard was further inspired to take action on a global scale when they met up with a whole lot of great organizations and passionate environmentalists, all with the common goal of protecting our ocean, at Protect Blue Conference in Noli. How can we successfully ban single-use plastic across the world?
With this question in mind, Starboard created a plastic regulation matrix and map – showing the legal actions taken against a series of different virgin plastic products around the globe.
The Plastic Regulation tool serves as a roadmap to banning plastic – showing that is possible to fight the plastic pollution. Starboard aims to use this to educate, inspire and push for more policies on plastic. They have even implemented their own internal ban on single-use plastic, prohibiting all such items from being used at headquarters in Bangkok.
