Bottles for Babies

Bringing a baby coral to life requires some costly preparation before the adult coral can even have sexy time.

The RRF must work hard to create the perfect, complex habitat for coral to thrive in, and make sure it’s resilient and attractive to reef critters to ensure the whole ecosystem is stable for the future.

After saving coral cuttings from the reef and fostering a new generation on tree frames, the RRF can now plant ‘mature’ coral in that habitat and wait for them to get busy (wink wink). The plan is for them to spawn and naturally repopulate the reef!

When corals spawn, they release millions of egg-and-sperm bundles into the water column. But, only 100 in a million bundles become a real life baby coral.

So for every adult coral the RRF plants, the process from start to finish (preparing the habitat to just one new baby coral populating the reef) has a cost, which the RRF has cleverly calculated so that they can do their work effectively into the future.

We have agreed to donate that value from each Unwritten product sold to help RRF bring even more baby corals to life using that process.

For sure. Unfortunately, we know there are companies out there who talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk… that’s not us, hand on heart. We’re incredibly invested in our commitment to the RRF, especially because our founders, Rob and Hayden, are mad-keen on diving and the ocean.

So, as we travel along the Unwritten journey selling our really good stuff for hair, we promise to give you regular updates via social media about our ongoing donations to the RRF. We’ll even bore you with our newborn baby coral photos. Cuuuuuuuuuuute!

Funny you should ask, actually. One of the Unwritten team members said they look like chicken feet. Here’s a photo so you can make up your own mind.

Carbon Neutral is an Australian organisation that actively helps companies manage their footprint calculation and become certified as carbon neutral. And that’s exactly what we did!

Through the process, you can choose to participate in or support a range of actions and solutions that will offset your company’s carbon footprint. At Unwritten, we chose to invest in native reforestation, specifically in the Yarra Yarra Biodiversity Corridor. This large scale reforestation project is revegetating the landscape with native trees and shrubs to encourage wildlife to return while at the same time removing carbon from the atmosphere. The goal is to create a 200km long green corridor from inland all the way to the coast, reconnecting remnant vegetation with 12 nature reserves across a 10,000km2  area.

You can read more about it here, or scroll up a little to check out the video.

Abso-bloody-lutely! This is SUPER important to our mission. We know our industry has a history of ‘green-washing’, so we put our operations under the microscope with a couple of major organisations to make sure that what we’re building is as gentle as can be for us humans, our furry friends and Mother Earth.

Our ethos and commitment to sustainability is unwavering. We have vowed to incrementally improve every part of our business for people, planet and profit as we journey towards a completely sustainable future.

When we ventured into using sustainable packaging for our products, we evaluated so many options – refillable plastic bottles, refill pouches, even plastics made from food crops such as corn. The problem with these ‘solutions’ is that they come with their own set of problems; they’re not recyclable or in the case of the food-based plastics, they consume valuable arable land that could be used for food production. When it comes to sustainability, there is no ‘silver bullet’ to take care of everything… it’s about trial and error, and doing as much as you can with what you have.

So we settled on reusing plastic that had already been in circulation and was ready for a second life. We originally planned to use 100% recycled HDPE (it’s one of the most recyclable plastics out there), but the cost is unfortunately still prohibitive for most businesses like Unwritten that are trying to do the right thing. This is largely because there’s not enough recycling infrastructure and recycling businesses out there offering this service to help build a competitive pricing scale in this market.

So, right now our bottles consist of 30% recycled plastic, but things are evolving rapidly in this space and we’re confident that over the next few years, we’ll be able to transition our bottles to 100% recycled material.