There’s a big chance that items you’ll find in your bathroom make up some of the 120bn units of packaging produced by the beauty industry annually. And those single-use amenity bottles in hotels? According to The Wall Street Journal, an estimated 5bn of them are thrown away yearly. But Nohbo, Winner of The Ocean Impact Pitchfest 2022, has developed a solution to help CPGs and the hospitality industry ditch single-use plastic. Encapsulating your favourite personal care products into plastic-free single-use or full-size ‘serves’ that literally disappear with water.

Did you know that the equivalent of one garbage truck worth of plastic ends up in the ocean every minute? And according to the OECD, 40% of global plastic waste actually comes from packaging. One New Zealand startup is on a mission to make sustainable packaging that does better. And whether they’re creating compostable mailers that declare “I’m a real dirt bag” or putting a giant emoji poo made of plastic waste on Bondi Beach - they seem pretty passionate about it.

Did you know that the industry standard coating for marine vessels, antifouling paint, is toxic? Antifouling coatings usually contain biocides to help prevent the growth of marine organisms (biofouling), and are often designed to self-erode when organisms eventually do take hold. But one German startup has developed an alternative solution with commercial shipping vessels in mind.

Wet trade slurry (eg. cement slurry) is generated on building sites every day, and often finds its way into water systems. For one experienced Sydney builder, it was a problem he’d observed far too often. He had enough of seeing tradespeople cutting corners on site, and slurry being dumped out. Subsequently ending up down stormwater drains and out into rivers, and eventually the ocean. So he created SLURRYTUB, a bright orange solution to this grey problem.

Without climate mitigation and adaptation, half the world’s beaches could disappear by the end of the century due to climate change-induced coastal erosion and rising seas. Coral reefs have been a hero in protecting our coastlines, but climate change is impacting them too. Luckily, CCell has a solution to grow digitised, living artificial reefs that help combat coastal erosion.

How do you monitor catch on fishing vessels out at sea? The traditional - and archaic - process for this is not exactly scalable. But one ocean impact startup may have found the ‘unlock’ for sustainable fisheries monitoring, by utilising AI technology.

Around 700,000 microfibres are released doing an average load of washing. Mocja Zupan (Founder and CEO of PlanetCare) compares this to dumping one plastic bag into the ocean per week, just by doing laundry! Microplastics are a big problem: after all, they’ve been found in the Mariana Trench, in our food, and even in our blood! But PlanetCare is on a mission to stop microfibres from your washing machine.

With the decommissioning of thousands of aging offshore oil and gas platforms imminent, the question remains: what do we do with them? One female-owned startup has developed a tool to predict exactly that, putting data in the hands of decision-makers to choose the best outcome for the ocean and Blue Economy.

Did you know that biofouling can contribute to a 20-55% increase in global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions per vessel? This is just one of the many consequences of this pesky problem. In the first episode of our Pitchfest 2022 series, we chat to Hullbot CEO and co-founder Tom Loefler about how this Sydney-based robotics startup is sustainably tackling biofouling prevention, and building the world's most advanced underwater drone.