When we launched Lost Years Rum just three short months ago, we set out to create a luxury 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.

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, 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. They re-calculate our carbon emissions at the start of every year and we then make a financial contribution to offset our carbon footprint.

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.

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! 

Lost Years is the sustainable rum brand devoted to saving sea turtles.