Tim Silverwood On Protecting The Ocean By Supporting Innovation Ecosystems

Tim Silverwood is an award-winning environmentalist committed to reducing human impacts on the natural world. A keen surfer, Tim became alarmed at the risks plastic pollution posed to the ocean and wildlife, co-founding the not-for-profit organisation ‘Take 3 for the Sea’ in 2009.

After ten years building Take 3 into a social movement and successful charity, Tim launched Ocean Impact Organisation (OIO) in 2020. OIO is Australia’s first ocean impact ecosystem and startup accelerator helping people to start, grow and invest in businesses that positively impact the ocean.

Tim’s achievements include being awarded the 2014 Green Globe ‘Sustainability Champion’; featuring in the popular ABC series ‘War on Waste’ and starring as an ‘Ocean Guardian’ in the 2017 feature documentary ‘Blue’.

A regular fixture in news and media, Tim delivers a firm, reasoned and insightful case for ‘business as unusual’ to create an abundant and sustainable future for Planet Ocean and its inhabitants.

Tim discusses how generating an ecosystem for innovative entrepreneurs can help clean and protect our oceans in the future.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - Tim, let's start with a little bit about your background and what led to your passion in founding, supporting and growing these initiatives and organisations that positively impact the ocean?

[Tim Silverwood] - I think I was meant to be a conservationist from a very young age. I was just really attracted to the natural world, and as a young surfer just had so many formative experiences in the ocean. I grew up on twenty-five acres of bush land on the New South Wales central coast. When I went through my studies in high school and eventually a Bachelor of Science at university, it was just glaringly obvious that the planet, diversity of species and ecosystems we humans exist within is incredible on this pale blue marble. Also, it is obvious it needs all the help that it can get. I've dedicated my life now to conservation.

You mentioned in the introduction Take 3 For The Sea where I had a remarkable and proud experience in building and leading that charity for 10 years. Now, beginning in 2020, I decided to jump ship and start something brand new with my co-founder Nick Chiarelli. It was based on this sentiment that we can't always rely on civil society and the non-profit sector to fix all the problems that humans have created. We need business to be better, and we need government to be much more supportive of businesses that are doing good for the planet and not harm. At OIO, our core goal is to obviously help people start, grow and invest in businesses that positively impact the ocean.

I truly believe we need a radical shift in more and more businesses built from the ground up who are doing good, but to also then influence larger companies and governments to be much more proactive in mitigating harm and promoting good.

As Co-Founder of the Ocean Impact Organisation, what is it that you do and how is it that you're supporting other organisations?

We are a start-up accelerator and ecosystem to support businesses that are working to improve ocean health. As we're only a relatively new organisation (19 months into our journey), we're still not fully resourced. We're not yet offering our very curated accelerator program, and we have visions it'll be a three-month program with a cohort of 10 start-ups. We would also provide funding for organisations to come in and participate in that program. We will nurture, support and help you find external investment and whatever it is that you require to take your next steps. In these earlier stages, what we've done is built a brand.

We've really laboured over this idea of being an ocean impact business, a business that can illustrate either now or in the future that you are making a positive impact on the ocean. It's really important to acknowledge that doesn't mean you have to interact with salt water.

We ran our first big campaign last year called The Ocean Impact Pitchfest, which essentially is a global competition where you can put forward your business and solutions. It's a very simple process with an online form, and then you submit a pitch video that's judged by a multidisciplinary panel of judges. The winner last year, for example, was a company called Planet Protector Packaging, and their mission is to eradicate expanded polystyrene boxes from food delivery services. They have a warehouse in Western Sydney, and you wouldn't necessarily think of them as being an ocean impact business first and foremost.

They're providing an innovative packaging solution whereby they use waste from the wool industry to create a relatively fine felt, which coupled with recyclable cardboard containers creates this insulative packaging solution that performs better than expanded polystyrene. But of course, expanded polystyrene is horrendous for the ocean. It breaks apart, it gets blown out of rubbish bins or from people leaving them outside their homes or businesses. It gets obliterated by-passing cars, and suddenly you're dealing with tens of thousands of small pollutants. This is only one example of an ocean impact business who have come up with a remarkable innovation, which has really got its eyes set on making a huge and positive impact when it scales.

You have deep experience in this ocean impact space over ten years of building Take 3 For The Sea. What were the key lessons that you learn over those years in growing the organisation?

The first big lesson Tom is just how challenging this space is. It's easy to start a not-for-profit organisation. It's easy to have a great idea and declare that you intend to make a positive impact.

But turning that into something which is sustainable and grows year on year, particularly under that non-profit and non-traditional model is really quite difficult.

At the end of the day, what really allowed Take 3 to grow and to keep creating a positive impact was the generous support of donors. You get increasingly more confident and comfortable approaching donors that have more means to support you. It was an eternal cycle of applying for grants, so you’re really going to make sure you've got someone in the team or the services around you who is aware of and applying for the most applicable grants.

Increasingly with Take 3 For The Sea as we built this global brand, it was those commercial affiliations and relationships that became important. This is because when you're out there doing good, which Take 3 does, not only does it have millions of people around the world who are practitioners of the simple action of going down to a beach or anywhere in nature and picking up a few pieces of plastic and being proactive with their own waste, but it's also the education programs going out there into schools, which is what Take 3 does so well. Hundreds of thousands of young people go through our education programs. It really is a solid proposition for a commercial sponsor to say, "we want to be seen to be supporting you." They were definitely some of the big challenges, but when I look at OIO, which is set up as a non-profit organisation, the fact we're focused much more on good business for a better future really excites me.

You cannot deny that whether it's the social entrepreneurship model or businesses that are impact first and foremost, if you've got a business model that works, you can really start to chart your success and show how an increasing revenue is going to result in increasing impact.

You're not going to have that same level of uncertainty that I certainly started to feel towards those latter years with Take 3 For The Sea, where you were building your organisation and capacity, but sometimes your funding horizons were really unpredictable when you focused solely on grants, government, and even to a lesser extent commercial relationship.

Great learnings there Tim. Beyond your organisations, you're involved in other projects as well, such as the HATCH: Taronga Accelerator Program, and in doing so have undoubtedly seen really important traits that successful impact led entrepreneurs have. Have you identified what those traits are and do you see any common ones?

Certainly, the passion, drive and commitment to see a project through is important. You don't meet many successful entrepreneurs who can't show off the battle scars of their experiences where it has been tough, but they've persevered and being able to really get through the hard times.

A trait that I really wanted to shine a light on, which has been very important for me is really knowing yourself.

This is particularly if you are a founder, co-founder or going to be the one in the hot seat as your idea does go through challenging times. You've really got to know yourself and know what makes you work optimally, know when to pick up on the signs that things are operating optimally and be able to navigate around that as best as you possibly can.

Do all that really important life planning, self-profiling and understanding yourself. Also understand what helps your co-founder or co-collaborators work at their best, but additionally preserve your own health and sustainability over that of the company and of course the ecosystem that you occupy.

Speaking of advice, for impact-led entrepreneurs who are working right now at validating and testing their business model in the early stages, do you have any particular advice for them?

I really have just benefited from networks and communities of like-minded people, particularly those that have experience around the problem or the solution that I'm working on. I really cannot stress the importance enough of making sure it's not just you, your team and a small cluster squirrelling away and not interacting with the broader world and ecosystem.

I want to emphasise that it might be a little bit frightening and even terrifying sometimes opening up to others or approaching a mentor that you might believe is out of your league.

You really have to persevere through those thoughts because you'll never quite have that feeling when you open up to someone and you realise that there's help out there or people that can give you even just a passing glance of advice that can be so transformational. I really do think expanding your network and finding those people who can be your guides and mentors is important.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently that are creating positive social change?

I mentioned Planet Protector Packaging who were the inaugural winner of the Ocean Impact Pitchfest in 2020. We just launched two weeks ago on the 10th of August the Ocean Impact Pitchfest 2021, and right now I'm receiving applications live. Even over the weekend I've been looking at my phone and seeing these incredibly inspiring solutions coming in. At the end of Pitchfest 2020, we shined a light on twelve finalists. The runner up was a renewable energy company called Wave Swell Energy who use a biomimicry inspired design to harness renewable ocean wave energy. It's like a ferry which has been custom built with a cavity in the centre, and as the waves displace air in the cavity, it spins a turbine and creates renewable energy. Another idea was looking at the enormous problems of intertidal species biodiversity. As we've industrialised coastlines around the world and created hard concrete edges, erosion controls that promote biodiversity have now been created. We had a remarkable Spanish innovation who use satellite imagery to monitor the ocean.

The ocean is so vast that what happens out there is completely out of sight, and therefore out of mind. Through satellite imagery however, they can monitor pollution events oil spills and start to look at illegal fishing and other unreported activities.

This will help really make sure that we manage the oceans more effectively. There are solutions for new models of aquaculture, and we've got a massive problem in Australia at the moment with sea urchins that come down with warming waters and start to occupy ecosystems where they haven't before. They decimate endemic kelp beds, so people are looking towards how sea urchins and their roe (which is a very sought-after delicacy in parts of the world) can actually be harvested. We can actually start to sell that roe as proprietary feed in aquaculture settings and make a lot of money by selling those products back into other markets. We had people looking at nitrogen and phosphorus pollution from farm activities that are now decimating things like coral reefs with pollution events.

Their approach became to create circular economy solutions to capture those phosphates and nitrates and re-circulate them back as fertiliser.

You are more than welcome to go and check out the Ocean Impact Organisation website and peruse those dozen finalists from last year to really get a sense of the changes that we're aggregating and supporting through our organisation.

To finish off, let's talk about books, magazines, blogs and other resources you would recommend to others.

I will definitely plug my own podcast here if you don't mind! We run The Ocean Impact Podcast, and we must be about fifty episodes into our journey now. The episodes are stories of inspiration, innovation, leadership and good business all towards promoting ocean health. In terms of books, from a young age, I was diving into the works of David Suzuki and watching David Attenborough. I am a big fan of Tim Flannery; I love Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari because it help put my life and unique existence on this weird little Earth that I'm lucky enough to occupy into the context of the planet. At the end of the day, I love to talk about the Overview Effect. When astronauts go out to the edge of space and they look back, they see this tiny, humble, fragile blue marble in the context of the blackness of space.