When we launched Lost Years Rum in November 2020, we set out to create a rum brand with a difference – a sustainable rum brand which not only celebrates the joy of authentic, unadulterated Caribbean & Latin American rum, but also does good to the environment.

As the rum brand dedicated to saving sea turtles, we donate a portion of profits from every sale to our charity partner SEE Turtles, which then funds community-based conservation projects across the Caribbean & Latin America. 

But that’s just part of our story.

Right from the start we decided to offset our carbon emissions in a very special way – not by planting trees, as so many organisations now do, but by planting the ocean wonder-plant, seagrass.

Through our partnership with the Ocean Foundation’s Seagrass Grow project, we’re offsetting our carbon emissions by planting and protecting seagrass around Puerto Rico, right in the heart of our Latin America heartland. 

It’s a well-kept secret, but seagrass really is an ecological wonder plant:

• It captures carbon up to 35 times faster than tropical rainforests
• It absorbs up to 10 per cent of the ocean’s carbon each year
• A football pitch sized area of seagrass can support over 50,000 fish and 700,000 invertebrates

There’s also evidence emerging that seagrass collects plastic particles in natural bundles of fibre called ‘Neptune balls’.  According to one recent report in Scientific Reports journal, seagrass may collect 900 million plastic items from the Mediterranean alone every year.  Check out this article from The Guardian.

The process itself is fairly simple - the Ocean Foundation re-calculate our carbon emissions at the start of every year based on our activity and we then make a financial contribution to offset our carbon footprint.  We're a very small business at present, so we don't generate huge amounts of carbon, but everything we can do to help #RestoreOurEarth is worth it!

We’re early in our journey as a business, but it made sense to put this in place from the very start, alongside our sea turtle conservation efforts and our zero plastic, sustainable packaging.  The green sea turtles, which eat so much seagrass it turns their flesh green, certainly approve! 

With Earth Day taking place next week (22-23 April 2021) have a think about your own carbon emissions and how you could reduce or offset them.