No large company can function today without an ethical commitment, without a drive for solidarity and environmental responsibility. The Prada Group has opted for the protection of the seas with its ambitious initiative Sea Beyond. This Tuesday he announced in Paris, at the Unesco headquarters, that he is expanding the financial resources dedicated to the project and its scope of activities.
The Italian fashion firm will contribute 1% of the income generated by its Re-Nylon collection to the Sea Beyond program, made up of products made largely from recycled waste recovered from the sea, such as plastics and abandoned fishing nets.
Present at the presentation were the executive secretary of Unesco (the UN agency dedicated to education, culture and science), Vladimir Ryabinin, and Lorenzo Bertelli, head of Prada's Corporate Social Responsibility.
The Sea Beyond project began in 2019, shortly before the pandemic, and has focused its efforts on raising awareness among children and adolescents about the importance of preserving the oceans. The educational program has been developed in schools in Brazil, China, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Portugal, the United Kingdom and South Africa. In Venice there has been a special activity, 'Kindergarten in the lagoon', with children in the preschool phase. The city of canals, due to its vulnerability to pollution and climate change, is an ideal setting for raising awareness at an early age. The Prada Group has also done educational work among the 14,000 employees it has around the world.
With the extra funding from Prada, Sea Beyond will be able to strengthen its work, beyond the educational field, in the areas of scientific research and humanitarian projects. In collaboration with Unesco and its Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), a coordination office for the Ocean Decade program will be opened in Venice to include the preservation of the seas in school programs around the world.
"The world of luxury has the duty and the opportunity to do more," Bertelli said at a press conference. "Those who have more should do more." "Through Sea Beyond, we continue to pursue our objectives in the area of education - continued the Prada senior executive -. It is the only way to go. Prevention is always less expensive than solving the problem. It is much easier to conquer the heart and mind of a 12-year-old than a 40-year-old."
The Prada Group and UNESCO plan to organize, in 2024, the first world conference on ocean education, in coordination with another that will take place the same year in Barcelona on the same subject.
The Re-Nylon collection, which provides the money to finance Sea Beyond, embodies the innovative evolution of the Prada brand's most iconic and recognizable element, nylon. Products in the Re-Nylon range are made from regenerated nylon from recycled and purified plastic collected from the oceans, including fishing nets, as well as textile fiber waste. Through a depolymerization and purification process, and a subsequent transformation into new polymers -later converted into threads- the resulting fabric can be eternally regenerated without losing quality.
