GOT BAG, an eco-friendly, outdoor, and lifestyle travel brand that has developed the world’s first backpacks made of Ocean Impact Plastic, is proud to announce that it has collected more than 1 million pounds of plastic since its inception.
GOT BAG started collecting plastic from the ocean, recycling it, and processing it into backpacks in 2016 with the creation of their ocean clean-up program. GOT BAG pays a network of more than 2,000 fishers on the north coast of Java in Indonesia. GOT BAG has been able to increase the amount of plastic collected/capacity of the program steadily since then.’
Based on scientific findings and on-site experience, GOT BAG also knows the importance of preventing improperly disposed plastic waste from entering the ocean in the first place. At the beginning of this year, with their collection points, they have thus started to additionally collect plastic waste on land, cleaning up communities and helping to prevent plastics that could have been ocean-bound.
What is Ocean Impact Plastic?
Ocean Impact Plastic summarizes the various types of plastics collected by the team. At this moment, about ⅓ of plastics are still collected from the ocean directly, and roughly ⅔ are ocean-bound. GOT BAG has been closely documenting these figures with its partner ‘Cleanhub’ to transparently track the amount of plastic collected and the composition to disclose its exact origin. The total amount collected can be accessed through a live tracker on the got-bag.com website.
“We are extremely proud to have reached this milestone, and we couldn’t have done it without the help of our amazing staff and our incredible network of around 2,300 people. We are an impact-driven company, and it is our business to make a positive impact. With that said, there is more work to do. We are committed to fighting plastic pollution and cleaning our oceans while making something useful with the waste. Studies estimate there are now 15-51 trillion pieces of plastic in the world’s oceans.”
For more information about GOT BAG, visit https://us.got-bag.com/.
About GOT BAG
GOT BAG is a social-first fashion brand dedicated to cleaning our oceans from plastic pollution. The brand launched in North America in October 2020. To help create a plastic-free future for our oceans, GOT BAG collects and recycles plastic from the ocean, including mangrove regions, nearshore areas, and the delta region of local rivers. To date, GOT BAG’s efforts have recovered and recycled more than 1 million pounds of Ocean Impact Plastic. Benjamin Mandos founded GOT BAG while on a sailing trip in Southeast Asia. He was shocked by the images of the floating garbage patches mainly formed of plastic. He knew he had to do something about it and launched the company in 2016: https://us.got-bag.com/