Despite the popular “green” trend in fashion, Brian Linton is going against the tides with a bluer direction: His new sustainable clothing line, United By Blue, has pledged to remove one pound of trash from the ocean for every product sold at their store.
Linton grew up in Singapore, and was moved by the beautiful — and at times not-so-beautiful — tropical beaches that had been littered by trash.
“Water has always been my focus, since I was little,” Linton says. “The basis [of the company] is the preservation of the resource that is most important to us.”
The UBB team has removed more than 2,000 pounds of trash from waterfronts and beaches since April, and has set a goal of 15,000 pounds of trash removed from the oceans before 2011. They’ve cleaned up water in North Carolina, Florida, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Their summer target area is the mid-Atlantic region that includes Massachusetts, Baltimore, New York and the Greater Philadelphia area.
“We are a for-profit organization, but this works better with what we are doing because we are able to use the money that we make to go toward our work,” Linton said. “If we had donated money instead of using it, there wouldn’t be any control over what happened to it. This way, the profits are allocated toward our own work.”
