Here at FEKKAI, we’ve made a bold commitment to reduce plastic waste and save the planet. But we don’t want to go on this globe-changing journey alone, so we’re proud and excited to be working with organizations like Heal The Bay who have a long history of protecting our oceans. The non-profit is using its powers of environmental advocacy to make the waterways of Los Angeles safe, healthy, and clean for both humans and marine life.
It’s why we partnered with Heal The Bay for our first big launch moment of our new, good-for-you collections.
We headed to the sunshine state for our FEKKAI Takes Santa Monica Pier beach clean-up and salon pop-up, where we built a sustainable hair styling space right on the beach. Heal The Bay has already been doing monthly beach clean-ups on Santa Monica Beach since 1990, so we tagged along and brought our founder Frederic Fekkai, actress Dove Cameron, surfer Anastasia Ashley, our brand ambassador and celebrity stylist Chad Wood, and so many others who helped make the weekend a success. With everyone’s help, we collected 70 lbs of trash and 65 gallons of recyclables.
For the uninitiated, beach clean-ups are our new favorite way to spend the weekend. To kick each one off, Heal The Bay gives volunteers a short, but super informative 101 explainer on the difficulties littoral (meaning situated on the shore) environments face because of plastic waste and other trash. From there, everyone hits the beach—collecting trash and most importantly, tallying what they find. Heal The Bay then compiles all that information and influences eco-centric legislation by sharing it with local governments.
"This piece is really important because this is kind of the last chance we have to pick it up before it goes into the ocean,” Heal The Bay Outreach Coordinator Danielle Furuichi told GOOD about their beach clean-up initiative. “Once it's in there, there's no really getting it out.” She continued, “the problem with plastic is it does not biodegrade...It actually photo degrades, which means it would break up into a bunch of really tiny pieces and actually dissipate even more at the microscopic level, what we call microplastics."
Our January beach clean-up was the first of many we’re hoping to do with Heal The Bay, along with continuing to empty our oceans and landfills of plastic waste that will be repurposed into our products. We already purchased 64 million grams of post-consumer plastic in our first year and we’re on our way to top that in our second.
Sign-up to volunteer with Heal The Bay here and stay glued to this space for our next clean-up initiative.
