bluegain’s Social Impact Project 2023
Treasuring the Planet

/ bluegain’s Social Impact Project 2023

/ The bluegain Social Impact Project 2023 focused on marine conservation and waste management in the Indian Ocean, rehabilitating sea turtles and addressing plastic pollution. The bluegain team also helped to close the loop by giving recycled plastic waste from the ocean a next life.

Jun 30, 2023 | by Carsten Linz

In one of our last white papers, we presented the historic United Nations Treaty on the High Seas. To sum it up shortly: the negotiations resulted in ensuring that 30% of the oceans are declared protected areas by 2030.  As important as such a binding legal framework is, the community is where implementation happens.

This is where our bluegain Social Impact Project 2023, launched in April, comes in. The ‘Atoll Marine Conservation Center’ in Naifaru located between Sri Lanka and Malé in the Indian Ocean, was our home for two weeks. Together with marine biologists and veterinarians, we did our part to rehabilitate turtles caught in ghost nets to release them back into the ocean.

The release of a rescued sea turtle is certainly an absolute highlight at any turtle rehabilitation center. To maximize the number of turtles it is important to minimize man-made threats for turtles contributing to the near extinction of these ancient species:

  • Pet Trade of Baby Turtles: Unfortunately, many sea turtles are still illegally kept as pets and 70% of them develop lordosis (curvature of the spine) as the carapace of hatchlings is soft. Due to their deformation of the carapace, the turtles cannot swim stably in the ocean and therefore cannot be released into the wild.
  • Floating Ghost Nets: When sea turtles become entangled in ghost nets, it is extremely likely that they lose one or more flippers which need to be amputated or develop buoyancy syndrome when the turtle hyperventilates (air in the body cavity) due to the stress in the ghost net.
  • Climate Change: You may not know that turtle reproduction is temperature dependent. If the temperature in the nest is too hot, the turtles will produce mostly females, but there must be an equal ratio of warm and cold temperatures for both sexes to produce and for the turtles to continue to reproduce.

Another aspect of our bluegain Social Impact Project 2023 was tackling the challenge of waste management. Waste is generally a problem on the local islands. Plastic bottles are by far one of the biggest waste problems. This is due to poor waste disposal on the islands themselves, but also due to the plastic that the tides bring. This affects the marine ecosystem and our environment. It is expected that by 2030 there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish, with some items lasting more than 400 years. Therefore, the bluegain team also helped to close the loop by giving recycled plastic waste from the ocean a next life. Concretely, our collected plastic bottles go into adidas products from the ‘adidas x Parley’ clothing and footwear series that help to protect and conserve the oceans.

Sustainability is an abstract concept, but it can start with concrete small steps to create a desirable future today. At bluegain, we want to make our contribution to the great transformation towards a more sustainable world and are already looking forward to our next Social Impact Project.

 

/ ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  • Dr. Carsten Linz is the CEO of bluegain. Formerly Group Digital Officer at BASF and Business Development Officer at SAP, he is known for building €100 million businesses and leading large-scale transformations affecting 60,000+ employees. He is represented on boards including Shareability’s Technology & Innovation Committee and Social Impact. A member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network, Dr. Linz is also a published author who shares his expertise as an educator in executive programs at top business schools.

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