Celebrating a splashing good year with Dock & Bay
This week, we’re delighted to be celebrating our first anniversary with Dock & Bay. Known for their unique and stylish quick-dry towels, Dock & Bay have been a brilliant partner over the last 12 months, raising an amazing $27,000 for WDC.
Over the past year, they have gone above and beyond with their charitable endeavours and environmentally conscious business model (a concept they call ‘Doing Our Bit’). It all started with their first charity collaboration towel with WDC, featuring a cute humpback whale design. The WDC towel was their first towel product made from 100% recycled materials and with 20% of sales donated to WDC, has provided much needed funds for our conservation work and campaigns in this challenging year. Dock & Bay also chose WDC to be one of their first ‘Charities of the Year’, pledging to donate 2.5% of their global net profits for the 2020-21 period.
Adding to this fin-tastic commitment, in October 2020 Dock & Bay launched a brilliant not for profit microfibre-catching laundry bag with WDC, that filters up to two thirds of micro-fibres released when washing synthetic textiles. Plastic pollution is a huge threat to whales and dolphins and all marine life. Studies have shown that whales are ingesting micro-plastics in alarming quantities with filter feeding whales like humpbacks at a great risk of this. This plastic-filtering laundry bag is one incredibly easy way you can help to reduce the amount of micro-plastics entering the ocean.
Dock & Bay take sustainability seriously, and are continuously making changes to reduce their impact on the environment and giving back to causes they care about. Since we started working together, Dock & Bay have upgraded their distribution centre with biodegradable and recyclable packaging and are rolling out their 100% recycled material for all their towels in the next year. These essential changes will not only create a more sustainable production line but will have enormously positive effects on reducing waste and pollution that so often ends up in the ocean, harming whales and dolphins.
Co-Founder of Dock & Bay, Andy Jefferies said: “We want to support charities that go above and beyond to help our planet and WDC is working towards an incredible goal that looks to protect these beautiful species, which in turn has huge benefits to our planet and our future. I've learnt so many interesting things from working with them this year including the importance of whales for removing carbon from the atmosphere for centuries to come. I can't wait to continue to follow their journey throughout 2021.”
2020 has been an incredibly tough year for charities and retailers alike, but with Dock & Bay’s unwavering support, and with their fantastic fundraising efforts, we have been able to successfully continue our fight to protect whales and dolphins.
Some of these successes include:
- Successfully persuading ex-whalers to start whale watching businesses in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, saving pilot whales, orcas and some species of dolphin from slaughter each year.
- Minke whale hunts in Iceland have ended, after years of WDC campaigning.
- Russia lists Transient orcas in the Red Data Book of endangered species, preventing them from being captured for the ‘entertainment’ industry, thanks to WDC’s funding of the Far East Russia Orca Project (FEROP).
- The Attica region in Greece heeds our call to end captivity in the region, with authorities revoking licences for the captive dolphin facility at Attica Zoological Park.
- A travelling dolphin show in Indonesia has been shut down following years of campaigning by activists supported by WDC
- The EU is now threatening legal action against France, Spain and Sweden after our campaigning
- Research we funded has proven that underwater sound devices called ‘pingers’ could be an effective, long-term way to stop porpoises getting caught in fishing nets, without having negative effects on their everyday lives.
These are just a few of the things that we have achieved in the last year and we couldn’t have done it without the support of partners like Dock & Bay.
So, on behalf of all the whales and dolphins across the globe, we’d like to say a huge THANK YOU to Dock & Bay.
