Blog
Impact Update 2024
It’s our 5th birthday this month, and we’ve just hit a milestone of 30 tonnes of plastic cleaned up 🌊 That’s equal to the weight of 🐟 30 million soy fish 🐟 prevented from causing harm in the ocean. If that many soy fish packets were laid end-to-end, they would reach the length of Honshu, the main island of Japan. We’ve achieved this through an amazing partnership with Seven Clean Seas, who not only clean up plastic from coastlines, mangroves, rivers and nearshore areas, but also provide formal employment and opportunities for locals in those places. They’re making a huge difference by addressing the cause of ocean plastic right at the source and helping the local community at the same time. The other source is of course the products we consume and how they are designed and move through our economy. We can always do more to reduce our reliance on single-use plastics and prevent any kind of waste from being created in the first place – and in the 5 years since we launched Light Soy, so much has been done to shift toward a circular economy by amazing people. Our products are designed to shine light on the positive side of humanity – we can make things better for the planet & for people people, bit by bit, drop by drop. It’s through science, technology, engineering, creativity, art and people that we will change the world. So thanks to everyone who has shared, purchased and loved our products – we’re very lucky to have a global community of sushi + design lovers to keep inspiring us ♥️ Learn more about the soy fish packets and how to make a difference
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Our partnership with Seven Clean Seas
Heliograf is proud to have partnered with the incredible team at Seven Clean Seas: an ocean impact organisation based in Singapore that removes plastic from coastlines, mangroves, rivers and nearshore areas in Indonesia and Thailand. Seven Clean Seas is an organisation in love with the ocean focusing on implementing plastic removal projects tackling environmental and social issues. Seven Clean Seas' goal is to remove 10,000,000 kilos of plastic –the weight of the Eiffel Tower– from the ocean and to hire 200 formal workers by 2025. To do so, Seven Clean Seas partners with businesses and individuals to co-create sustainability initiatives and targets that measure, reduce, and compensate for their plastic footprint. Seven Clean Seas follows industry best practices in all of their impact projects. This includes certification under recognised standards such as the Verra Plastic Waste Reduction Program and OBP Neutralization Certification and audited by Control Union. Certification is crucial not only to prevent plastic from re-entering the environment but also to ensure there is no child labour, workers are paid fairly, receive health benefits, and are treated with respect. Seven Clean Seas formally hires local crew members to improve socioeconomic conditions while providing full transparency on where the plastic waste is collected, deposited and who collected it. This ensures there is no green-washing or exploitation of cheap labour. Seven Clean Seas helps clean the environment and support the local community at the same time. For each Light Soy lamp that is shipped, Heliograf funds the removal of 2 kilograms of plastic from the marine environment with Seven Clean Seas. This is in addition to the recycled ocean-bound plastic in the lamp itself, which is sourced from other certified ocean-bound plastic cleanup and recycling suppliers. Learn more about Seven Clean Seas on their website and follow on Instagram
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Skip the soy fish when eating sushi
From the container, the soy sauce, wasabi and ginger packets, chopsticks and other bits and pieces, a quick bite of sushi could end up with a pile of trash that’s headed for the ocean. But it doesn’t have to be like this! Here’s some things you can do to make a difference. Rethink, reuse, recycle To reduce waste we need to think through these steps in order. How can we rethink, reduce and redesign waste? How can we reuse the things we can’t avoid? As a last resort, how can we recycle that waste into something purposeful? Skip the fish & other single-use items The little soy packets are a waste and, frankly, shouldn’t exist. The biggest way you can make a difference is to skip the fish – and stop using all single-use plastic whenever possible. Re-use Switching to reusable items will make a big difference. Ask your local sushi shop if they will let you bring your own container, and take proper chopsticks. If you can eat at home or the office, use a soy sauce bottle with a small dish for saucing your sushi. If you have no choice but to use single-use plastic, try to re-use it as many times as you can. You can rinse and refill the soy fish packets by squeezing them in a shallow dish. Look for sustainable alternatives Where single-use items are unavoidable, they can be substituted for compostable alternatives, like those made from paper pulp. There are new plastic-free alternatives becoming available all the time! Recycle For anything that’s left, recycling is a last resort that can turn waste back into useful things. The little soy fish are so small that they generally can’t be recycled in domestic waste if they are loose. You can pack them in a larger container made from the same type of plastic. Many soy fish packets are made from LDPE (low-density polyethylene) which has the resin code #4, but you’ll need to check yours. If you’re unsure, don’t put them in the recycling, put them in the bin. Restaurants If you run a restaurant, reducing waste and getting rid of single-use plastics can lower costs, and benefit your brand. Ask if customers need any single-use items and how many they need Provide reusable items like eat-in serve-ware and sauce pourers Join or start a container return scheme Eliminate any excess packaging Use compostable alternatives to single-use items Offer a discount to customers using reusable items About our design We created Light Soy to highlight the big impact of small objects on ocean plastic and encourage people to quit single-use plastic. Light Soy’s recycled ocean-bound plastic shade is making a real difference in regions most affected by plastic pollution.
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The big problem with little soy sauce fish packets
The iconic soy sauce fish packets used with sushi are loved around the world for their cuteness & convenience, but they are an environmental disaster that needs to be stopped. History The containers, called shoyu-tai (soy-sauce snapper) in Japanese, were invented in the 1950s to replace glass or ceramic bottles. They became a popular way to add a squirt of soy sauce to takeaway sushi. There are hundreds of different shapes and sizes. The problem Like plastic straws and coffee cups, the packets are a big waste! They’re used for just a few moments, then tossed. They are difficult to recycle, so they end up clogging landfills and in the ocean – sadly ironic given their shape. These tiny fish are a symbol of our wasteful, single-use economy. Single-use The tiny containers hold just a few drops of soy sauce. You might use a whole handful of them just to sauce a few piece of sushi. They’re hard to refill, so best-case they go into the trash and end up in landfill, or worst case they get tossed straight on the ground and end up in the ocean. What a waste! Hard to recycle While they are made of a recyclable plastic, polyethylene, the packets are so small they cause problems with recycling machines. To go through the machines properly, they need to be put into a larger container made of the same plastic. This means they are almost never recycled. Pollution Plastics go into drains and rivers and are carried to the ocean. They drift on ocean currents, slowly breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces until they become microscopic particles that enter our food and water supplies – polluting our bodies too. Marine Life Tragically, to birds and marine life, the packets look just like their normal food (fish!). Once ingested the plastics cause the animals to slowly and painfully starve to death. Bigger plastics can trap marine life, leaving them maimed, or slowly drowning them. All so we can have some soy sauce with our sushi. Microplastics Plastic lasts a long, long time, so packets that are used for just seconds will remain in the environment for hundreds of years exposed to sun, wind and water which break them down into microplastic particles. Microplastics have been found in our bodies, on the highest mountains, and at the deepest points of the ocean. We can do better Plastic is an amazing material – when it’s used sensibly, but so often it isn’t. We need to rethink our economy and stop waste and pollution at the source. As well as better habits, we believe that better design – of individual products and entire systems – is needed to fix plastic pollution. We need to rethink, reuse and recycle everything. Make a big difference: skip the little fish You can make a big difference simply by refusing to use single-use products, and seeking sustainable alternatives when you can't avoid them. Read more about how you can make a change About our design We created Light Soy to highlight the big impact of small objects on ocean plastic and encourage people to quit single-use plastic. Light Soy’s recycled ocean-bound plastic shade is making a real difference in regions most affected by plastic pollution.
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Light Soy wins Gold Good Design Award 2020
We’re delighted to share that Light Soy has been recognised in the Good Design Awards 2020. The winners of Australia’s peak international design awards – the highest honour for design and innovation in the country were announced today during the 2020 Good Design Week. Light Soy wins Gold Light Soy received a prestigious Good Design Award Gold Accolade in the Product Design Furniture and Lighting category in recognition for outstanding design and innovation. The annual Good Design Awards is Australia’s oldest and most prestigious international Awards for design and innovation with a proud history dating back to 1958. The Awards celebrate the best new products and services on the Australian market, excellence in architectural design, engineering, fashion, digital and communication design, design strategy, social impact design and young designers. The Good Design Award Gold accolade is awarded to designs that have not only met the criteria for Good Design, but exceed them. What the judges said The Good Design Awards Jury praised Light Soy, commenting: “A nice, playful product which will be a commercial success. Sense of humour about the design which is appreciated as well as thoughtful use of materials and adaptability of design. Cool social commentary and art.” Dr. Brandon Gien, CEO of Good Design Australia said: “Receiving a Good Design Award is a significant achievement given the very high calibre and record number of entries received in 2020.” “There’s no doubt it has been a really tough year for everyone so it’s nice to be able to share some good news for a change. The projects represented in this year’s Good Design Awards shine a positive light on our creative and innovative capacity as human beings. These inspirational winning projects give me hope and optimism that our design community will continue to innovate, no matter how challenging the world around us is,” said Dr. Gien. “Australia’s Good Design Award is more than a symbol of design excellence – it represents the hard work and dedication towards an innovative outcome that will ultimately make our lives better. These projects showcase the shear brilliance of design and the potential it has to improve our world,” said Dr. Gien. We’re thrilled! Along with our inclusion in the longlist for the Dezeen Awards, we’re so pleased that our design ideas have resonated with people and are being recognised in this way.
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"Heliograf makes playful lamps in the shape of sushi soy sauce bottles"
By Natashah Hitti – 2 April 2020 Australian studio Heliograf’s Light Soy lamps are designed to emulate the fish-shaped soy sauce bottles found in sushi shops, as a comment on the damaging effects of single-use plastic. The idea for the Light Soy lamps was born after Heliograf founders Jeffrey Simpson and Angus Ware were shocked by how many of the disposable, soy sauce bottles they had used while eating sushi. Like other single-use plastics such as straws and coffee cups, the tiny, fish-shaped packets can’t be re-used and are difficult to recycle, meaning most end up in landfills or the ocean. Having both grown up by the coast, the Sydney-based duo struck by the irony that the plastic fish would eventually harm marine life. Modelled on these small, soy sauce containers, the Light Soy lamp is the designers’ way of highlighting the issue of single-use plastic and the impact it has on the environment. “By taking a piece of rubbish, and dramatically scaling it up, we want to show that small things matter, and we need to make big changes to how we design everyday items,” said Ware. “At every stage, from initial concept through to logistics, we have questioned how we can do better.” Heliograf worked with sustainable design studio Vert Design to develop a luxury product that would have a small footprint. Durable and recyclable materials including borosilicate glass and powder-coated aluminium were used to make the Light Soy lamp, which has been etched to achieve a frosted finish. The lamp has taken over three years to produce, two years of which were spent perfecting the glass-blowing technique and developing the right surface finish. “We chose to subvert our disposable culture by using premium materials and creating something that will be treasured, not trashed,” said Simpson. In order to make the packaging for the light entirely plastic-free and biodegradable, the team chose to use moulded sugarcane fibre instead of polystyrene or plastic. The lamp is available in two forms: a USB-C rechargeable table lamp or a pendant light. Both options have a built-in 3000K LED with touch-controlled dimming. The Light Soy lamp is the first release in a collection of designs by Heliograf that take cues from small, everyday objects. Simpson says the studio has “big plans” for the future. Source: Dezeen – Heliograf makes playful lamps in the shape of sushi soy sauce bottles
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