Fourth Element was the winner of the Shark Trust’s Shark Champions award in 2008, thanks to our work to raise public awareness of the plight of sharks and raising over 7000 pounds for the charity through the sales of our Shark Trust t-shirts.
70 – 100 million sharks a year are killed by humans. The vast majority of these are killed simply for their fins. Such senseless slaughter and greed is causing fishermen to abandon traditional catches in pursuit of ever younger shark, often killing the animals before they reach breeding age. The outlook for many shark species is bleak. Some populations are thought to have fallen by as much as 90% and the world demand is still growing.
The Shark Trust was established in 1997, to advance the worldwide conservation of sharks through science, education, influence and action. The Trust is: a founder member of the Shark Alliance; the Secretariat of the European Elasmobranch Association; and a membership organisation which provides a link between the public and the science community.
You can help, firstly, by boycotting restaurants that serve Shark Fin Soup, preferably educating the restaurateurs as to why in the process. Secondly, you can show people who may be tempted to kill sharks that they are a source of sustainable revenue through tourism. Thirdly, you can help the Shark Trust lobby government locally and further afield. We may be able to intervene before its too late.
Click Here to visit the website
This website is dedicated to helping turtle researchers to share ideas and resources, and fourth element is involved on a new initiative to help finance the site by producing turtle themed shirts, £3 of each sale of these garments will go towards the upkeep and improvement of seaturtle.org
This is an amazing project
Due to their huge size, oceans often mask how much humans might be negatively impacting marine ecosystems. This may be especially true of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gyre in the North Pacific Ocean where human produced plastic debris is thought be accumulating at a gathering point of oceanic currents. Very little is known about the size of the problem and threats to marine life and the gyre’s biological environment, but reports of a floating plastic island should be enough to concern us all.
The Project Kaisei team will embark on a multi-week expedition to the “Plastic Vortex” from the West Coast of the USA in order to:
- Study and document the marine debris found in this area of the Pacific Ocean;
- Test catch methods for removing the debris;
- Conduct research on the chemical interactions of marine debris in the gyre and select fishes and wildlife related to persistent organic pollutants (POPs);
- Understand the needs required to undertake an eventual large scale clean-up of the waste material;
- Test technologies for conversion into an economically viable by-product: diesel fuel, which could be used to power the vessels that return to collect more of the floating debris, reducing the environmental impact of this operation.
Find out more at www.projectkaisei.org
Fourth Element is currently developing base layer and other thermal garments using recycled plastic bottles and the new Eco-technical range is due to be launched next year.
