O'NEILL BLUE

O’NEILL BLUE, OUR OCEAN

O'Neill blue is an integral part of the brand’s global initiative to produce sustainable surf wear. The very oceans and waves that created O'Neill are under threat from a tsunami of plastic waste, with an estimated 8 million tons flooding the world's seas each year. This tragedy is the inspiration for O'Neill blue - Our Ocean Mission; an initiative to produce sustainable surf wear using high-performance eco-threads by Bionic, Econyl or Repreve which contain recycled plastic.

"The idea of taking something that would otherwise be waste or stuff that's polluting our beaches and then incorporating it back into the lifecycle of our clothes is a step in the right direction towards a more sustainable planet"

-- Kahi Pacarro, the director of Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii

3 steps from a plastic bottle to a polyester fabric

1. Collect
Plastic PET Bottles are collected along the beaches and from the sea. Sorted by type and color.


2. Recycle
They are stripped of their labels and caps, washed, crushed, chopped, melted and then extruded and made into a fiber.


3. Reuse
The fiber is processed into fabric, and the making of an O'Neill product can begin.

Sea odyssey

Without clean oceans and clean waves, we would not exist as an organization. It is our responsibility as an organization founded in the surf to help save our oceans. Just as Jack O'Neill created the Sea Odyssey in 1996 with the goal of educating students on the importance of the relationship between the living sea and the environment, we wish to continue to create programs that can bring about real change.

Transparent

Working alongside BIONIC YARN®, REPREVE®, and ECONYL®, the producers of durable threads developed from recycled plastics and ghost fishing nets, O'Neill expands its eco-friendly products.


Bionic

A high performance eco-thread, which contains recycled PET retrieved from plastic waste gathered from shorelines and sets up recycling stations at beaches, schools, hotels and town centers. The bottles are collected, chopped up, melted down, spun into yarn and woven into an eco-friendly fabric.

Repreve

Billions of plastic bottles go into landfills every year. REPREVE is the leading, most trusted, branded performance fiber made from recycled materials (including plastic bottles) made by Unify.

Econyl

Nylon waste from landfills and oceans around the world is transformed into ECONYL® regenerated nylon. It's exactly the same as brand new nylon and can be recycled, recreated and remoulded again and again. As well as being a solution on waste, ECONYL® regenerated nylon is also better when it comes to climate change. It reduces the global warming impact of nylon by up to 80% compared with the material from oil.


SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Since 2009 O’Neill Europe B.V. became a member of the Amfori BSCI. Their mission is to enable each of our members to enhance human prosperity, use natural resources responsibly and drive open trade globally. These are major challenges and we need to work collaboratively to tackle them and together we can influence and drive positive change at scale. The BSCI Code of Conduct is based on the most important international labour standards protecting the workers’ rights such as the International Labor Organization (ILO) Conventions and other important Declarations of the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) guidelines for multinational enterprises and the UN Global Compact. Most of our factories are audited according to the BSCI verification system, others are audited through SA8000 WRAP or SEDEX systems.

O’Neill wants to improve the quality of our social conditions within the supply chain through protecting the health and wellbeing of workers in the supply chain, our colleagues and our customers. We believe in working together with our partners and external stakeholders to improve workers labour conditions. Here we work closely together with Amfori, Bangladesh Accord and partners from the Dutch Agreement on Sustainable Garments and Textile (AGT).

A report on our CSR strategy will follow mid of this year.