Off to Sea with Cyrill Gutsch
- Words Robert Ito
- Photography Emma Trim
Meet the self-appointed design ambassador for the oceans.
- Words Robert Ito
- Photography Emma Trim
- Grooming Monica Alvarez
( 1 ) Lea Stepken is a film producer and co-founder of Parley for the Oceans.
( 2 ) Conference of the Parties (COP) is the decision-making body of the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
( 3 ) Since 2015, Parley for the Oceans and Adidas have worked together on a variety of sports products and apparel, including a line of running shoes made from recycled plastic waste retrieved from beaches and coastal communities.
( 4 ) In 2015, the artist Doug Aitken installed three underwater sculptures off the coast of California’s Catalina Island.
( 5 ) Parley Ocean School provides in-person and virtual programs to educate young people about the ocean and the environment.
CYRILL GUTSCH built his career as a designer for big-name brands. Then he founded Parley for the Oceans —and set out to change them.
For the past decade, Cyrill Gutsch has spent a sizable chunk of his waking hours trying to convince people, corporations and countries to be kinder to the sea. We all live together on this ocean planet, he says, and our lives and fates are inextricably tied to how we care for it. But rather than protesting in front of the corporate headquarters of oil companies or shaming brands and businesses on social media, Gutsch takes what he sees as a more productive approach to the problem. As CEO and founder of Parley for the Oceans, an environmental nonprofit based in New York City, Gutsch works as a unifier and collaborator, bringing companies and countries together to find ways to create greener products and to increase awareness about everything from climate change to the dangers of ocean plastics.
In many ways, Gutsch is ideally suited for the task. For years, the German-born activist was a designer whose clients included Adidas, Lufthansa and BMW, so he knows how these businesses operate and the sorts of pressures they’re under from consumers to clean up their ecological acts. Among his most recognizable design collaborations are Adidas sneakers “reimagined” from plastic waste retrieved from various international coastlines, and Clean Waves eyewear created from reclaimed fishing nets. But Gutsch is also the most persuasive of speakers, a nice thing to be when you’re trying to coax companies, many of them governed by decades of tradition and deeply entrenched business practices, to stop befouling our oceans.
Robert Ito: How can design and designers help the oceans?
Cyrill Gutsch: I’m a designer. My partner, Lea, is a designer.1 In our hearts, we like to make stuff. Look at plastic. On one hand, for a designer, it’s a dream material, right? It does everything you want, it bends to your will. On the other hand, it’s so toxic and creates this avalanche of waste. We felt that we could use the plastic waste that you find at the end of the world, that washes up on beaches, that entangles in the reef, as a catalyst to open up a conversation around materials. We said, Let’s take the stuff that nobody would ever pick up because it’s crazy expensive to do, and turn that into a premium material. Don’t get me wrong: Parley Ocean Plastic is not a better material than virgin plastic. But the act of removing it, of retrieving it—that is the difference. The collection alone costs 10 times, 20 times, sometimes 100 times more than virgin material, than virgin plastic. The value is in the story, the narrative, the impact that removing it has. Every piece of plastic we collect was removed from somewhere, and it didn’t end up in the belly of a bird or other animal. This becomes a value differentiator, a luxury.
Gutsch's projects often seek to demonstrate a point rather than provide scalable solutions. For example, in 2022, he installed the Parley Blueprint Module in London's Selfridges; a 3D-printing machine that turned plastic ocean debris into a range of on-demand objects.
( 1 ) Lea Stepken is a film producer and co-founder of Parley for the Oceans.
( 2 ) Conference of the Parties (COP) is the decision-making body of the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
( 3 ) Since 2015, Parley for the Oceans and Adidas have worked together on a variety of sports products and apparel, including a line of running shoes made from recycled plastic waste retrieved from beaches and coastal communities.
( 4 ) In 2015, the artist Doug Aitken installed three underwater sculptures off the coast of California’s Catalina Island.
( 5 ) Parley Ocean School provides in-person and virtual programs to educate young people about the ocean and the environment.
“The best way to care for something is to fall in love with it. That’s easy if you bring somebody under water.”
RI: How do you select who you partner with?
CG: We are very careful in picking the right partners. It’s always a process, because you often start from scratch. We work with artists that sometimes don’t have any consciousness or knowledge about the topic, so it takes a lot of time. Same with designers. And you work with brands that often also are not very open, because they’re scared: scared that it costs more, it changes their supply chain. But if they expose themselves to that, if they allow that, then it becomes this beautiful ping-pong game of exchanging knowledge or challenging each other and asking the questions nobody dares to ask. And the outcome is a better product—better in the sense of the carbon footprint and the materials being used.
RI: What do you do when a company comes to you that you know is a major polluter?
CG: We meet. There are some companies where you know that they can’t change, because their business model is simply built on exploitation, and they will not be able to meet the promise they give to their customers—that their product will come out cheap and fast. We couldn’t align ourselves with an automotive company that depends on burning fossil fuel, which is the No. 1 driver of climate change. We tell them: We can talk to you, we can work with you, but we can’t go out and show our brand next to you, because we would be promising something we know we couldn’t deliver. We’ve had companies that run the big marine parks reach out to us. Those are basically prisons for animals, and we didn’t see any indication that they wanted to change that, because the only possible outcome would be that they stopped being a marine park. But I think that every brand has the potential to do something very different with its name, because you don’t have to stick with what you have done in the past. A good brand is like good real estate. You can always build something else on it.
RI: Do you get a lot of companies who want to partner with you just to burnish their own corporate image?
CG: Today people want to say, Oh, we’re environmentally friendly, we’re green, we’re recyclable. Companies go to great lengths to try to create that appearance now, sponsoring the [climate summit] COP, or inventing new brands in their portfolio, or adding nice logos or even hiring young activists as models for their campaigns.2 Greenwashing means that you’re pretending to be something that you’re not. You didn’t change your business practices, you just want to make them look better.
RI: What are some of the bigger ecological issues that you’re involved in, and how do you prioritize those? I imagine every issue feels like the most important one.
CG: That’s true. We really look at two different forms of impact that we can make as an organization. There’s the hard impact: that means something that you can really measure, like saving a whale. The whale is entangled in a fishing net and you save the animal, the animal lives. That’s easy to measure. We intercept a certain amount of plastic waste, or we help regenerate an area of underwater forests or we stop poachers, like an illegal fisher, that’s also easy to measure. And then there’s soft impact: How many people do you educate? How many people do you help change their view on things, or give them the knowledge they need to live a better life, or to change their companies or their countries? That is not so easy to measure.
RI: With Clean Waves glasses, is the idea that people will like the look of them and then you can explain that they were actually made out of fishing nets?
CG: That’s it: We don’t like to preach. We like to create desire for objects. Our narrative, our storytelling and opening people’s hearts and brains happens most of the time with a great product. People see a new shoe from Adidas and they say, I couldn’t imagine that environmentalism could look that cool.3 When you look at our partnership with Dior, you don’t have the feeling that you’re compromising on quality and style. And suddenly these items become the symbols of change, they become a conversational item. People say, Can you imagine that? This was a fishing net before. Or, can you imagine that? This material was grown by a mushroom, or colored by an enzyme.
RI: I probably eat way too much fish and use way too much plastic. How are you doing in terms of living up to your own high ideals? And are there things you could do better?
CG: Oh, yeah. I mean, we’re all hypocrites. I don’t know any environmentalist who is not a hypocrite. Because we are saying things and we want people to do things, we want ourselves to do things, but it’s very hard. I just came back from a trip; I flew in an airplane around the world. So yeah, I’m doing things that are very sinful. But it’s not about being dogmatic. It’s about being aware that something is bad, and about doing the best you can not to be that bad.
RI: How do you get people who don’t care about the ocean to start to care?
CG: I think the best way to care for something is to fall in love with it. And that’s easy, if you have the opportunity to bring somebody under water, for example. If you get somebody to travel with you to remote areas and they allow themselves to meet a whale, meet a shark, go diving, that can make a big change. We do a lot of projects, even in very remote areas. We have one project with Doug Aitken—the Underwater Pavilions.4 We do Parley Ocean School events.5 We do expeditions. Bringing people into nature, exposing them to the beauty and the magic of the sea is, of course, the ideal way of doing it.
