How we started

 

 

My name's Ally and I've spent most of my career as a commercial Deep Sea diver, working everywhere from the Ivory Coast to Singapore to the crystal clear waters around Scotland.

You see a lot of things underwater that change how you think about the world, but nothing hit me quite like December 2019, when a 26T Sperm Whale washed up on Luskentyre Beach on the Isle of Harris. They found 100kg of rope, fishing net and plastic debris inside it.

Three months later I was working as a commercial diver on the salvage of a cargo ship called the MV Kaami, which had hit a reef just 20km from the Isle of Skye not far from that same beach. It was carrying 1,937 tonnes of shredded plastic, on its way to be incinerated. Diving in waste plastic, so close to where the whale had died, was the moment everything clicked. I couldn't keep doing this job and pretend I hadn't seen it.

At the time, I had a real interest in where my food came from.  I was growing herbs and chili plants on the windowsill of our kitchen in Glasgow, with my children. Nothing fancy, just basil and mint in whatever pots I had lying around. It got me thinking: what if the next pot I used was made from the plastic waste I kept seeing wash up on Scottish beaches? I had no manufacturing background at all, so I taught myself the basics,  melting, moulding, a lot of trial and error in my own kitchen and started making plant pots from plastic I collected off the beaches with my children, along with old fishing rope and net.

I sold my first batch of pots at a local food market in Edinburgh, planted with herbs. They were rough, made by hand, a few at a time. But people liked them, not just because they worked, but because of where the material had come from. As demand grew, so did our pots. We started making other garden tools using the same recycled material, and eight months after making that first pot on my kitchen table, I'd gone from a one-man operation to securing a manufacturer in Scotland to produce at a much larger scale.

It was around this time a chef friend got in touch. He'd seen what we were doing with ocean plastic and asked if we could make him a knife,  a proper one, with a handle made from the same rope and net waste as the pots and blade from either Germany or Japan. I'll admit I hadn't planned on making knives, but it made sense: kitchens generate so much plastic waste too, and chefs care about where their tools come from. So we sourced blades from Germany and Japan, paired them with handles made from broken fish boxes and crates, and Ocean Kitchen was born.

Today, designed in Glasgow and made in Scotland, we've recycled 24 tonnes of ocean plastic into kitchen and garden products built to be used  and then recycled again. In 2021 we won the first-ever Sustainable Garden Product of the Year Award at the RHS Flower Show, and Round 17 of Scottish Edge, backed by RBS Bank. It started with herbs on a windowsill and a whale on a beach. We're just getting started