Charlie Thomas is a Geography and Business graduate (2019) and founder of Babble & Hemp, a clothing company that produces shirts from hemp fabric instead of cotton.
I can’t say that there a specific moment that made me realise that wanted to start my own business. I had a good perspective on the pros and cons of being an employee versus working for yourself as I had one parent doing each. I think the main moment I realised I wanted to work for myself was how I earned money in university summers. One week I would coach tennis in exchange for a small hourly wage at a local summer camp. This was guaranteed money, known hours but a bit regimented. Then the next week I put myself on Gumtree offering my gardening services at a far better hourly rate and found ways to charge add-ons like waste removal.
Living near London and as a teenager, I hadn’t really seen the impact of unsustainable business practices manifested in real life. But one university summer when I’d earned some tennis coaching and gardening money, I went backpacking to Uzbekistan. It was an incredible country, wrestling to rediscover its vibrant history as a once incredibly important stopping point on the Silk Road trade route that had been concreted over during the days of the Soviet Union.
I visited the Aral Sea, once one of the largest lakes in the world at 26,000 miles squared, it had evaporated into a desert due to the re-routing of feeder rivers to irrigate cotton fields as part of the USSR industrial drive. As a result entire towns that had been on the water’s edge became ghost towns, ecosystems vanished - but the cotton blossomed. Seeing this in person was a pivotal moment and the start of my disdain for cotton!
In 2018, I took part in the cross-course India Field Trek to study the cotton industry in Mumbai. It was so eye opening. The University put on an amazing visit and enabled behind the scenes access to clothing manufacturers, cotton growers and environmental think-tanks. We gained an amazingly well-rounded view of the garment industry in India from several points of view. Seeing the detrimental effects cotton had first hand and then learning about hemp’s small environmental footprint from a small artisanal brand we came across was the lightbulb moment. I thought that if this unknown, greener fabric can be rolled out on an industrial scale, then that was where the solution was. I came home and realised that to have it on an industrial scale, I’d have to make hemp cool and better than everything else. If I could do that, then perhaps I’d also be able to earn a living.
On returning from the India trek, I was fascinated by hemp and wanted to get started in some way…any way! I built a website and collated a variety of hemp brands under one roof. Some hemp espadrilles from China, hemp eyewear from Edinburgh, hemp clothes from India, and sold a handful of items to friends. The turning point came when I wrote a letter to a well-known shirtmaker (Nick Wheeler of Charles Tyrwhitt) who kindly replied to say I was doing too much and risked coming across as amateur - whilst also not owning anything of real value in terms of a brand in the long run. He advised focusing on doing one thing, and being the best at it.
Hemp shirts it was, and hemp shirts it has been since!
After choosing colours and ordering large quantities of fabric, the shirts are made in Hanoi, Vietnam and shipped over to the UK where it becomes a marketing exercise to spread the word about hemp and grow the brand digitally. I get in front of people where I can, with initial market stalls at Notting Hill’s Portobello Road Market and other larger Christmas gift fairs. We have a considerable number of word-of-mouth referrals and a very high repeat-order rate, which is something I’m proud of and inspires me to continue with a focus on quality.
Through the business I am on a mission to see hemp replace cotton as our staple fabric. We can’t go on using cotton in the current quantities - it has such a detrimental environmental impact. I’d like Babble & Hemp to be central to the adoption of a greener, cleaner, fabric that becomes the new status quo and be part of a driving force towards reducing the environmental impact that the fashion industry has.
Cotton has been the status quo ever since the invention of the cotton gin saw Manchester become an industrial powerhouse in the 19th century. But today, we have to ask ourselves why that is still the case…one cotton shirt requires 10,000 litres of water to make it, through irrigating the fields to dying the fabric and a whole load of dangerous and pollutive chemicals releasing carbon.
Hemp is the natural antonym to that, growing organically using only rainwater, one hemp shirt requires one fifth of the water a cotton shirt requires.
I recently ran the London Marathon. The support at that event is wild – it really brings out the best in everyone! I got into endurance events early on as a way to counteract the unhealthiness of being a first year student at University, and to raise money for the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity who’d successfully treated Dad a few times. Now I just enjoy getting out there with a goal to work towards. I’ll be running the London Marathon in 2025 to try and get the Guinness World Record for fastest marathon wearing a shirt (hemp, naturally…).
And during the marathon, my thoughts turned to hemp. I concluded that we should all be running in hemp the whole time!
Damian Carrington (PhD Geology 1994) is Head of Environment at the Guardian newspaper.
I graduated with a PhD and post-doc in Geology in 1994. This included an amazingly memorable expedition to Antarctica. But I think my attention span was a bit short for academic life, so I started writing science stories for newspapers.
My first job was at BBC's Tomorrow’s World magazine, then BBC News Online. I went to New Scientist next and then the Financial Times. It was in 2008 that I took the opportunity to join the environment team at The Guardian - I made that move because it felt like climate change was going to be the biggest story of this century.
I spend all my time reporting on the triple crisis the planet is in - climate, wildlife loss and pollution. The Guardian has always taken the environment very seriously. In the 16 years I have been with them, the team has expanded. But the basic approach has largely stayed the same – environmental issues affect everything, so should feature across all our coverage.
I have written about 2,700 stories for the Guardian, and I’d hope most of them have played a part in building awareness of environmental issues.
It’s impossible to write about it every day and not act. I'm vegan, have a plug-in hybrid car and my energy supplier is renewable. I rarely fly for holidays and I cycle to work.
Damian Carrington on The Guardian website
Flora Blathwayt graduated in 2011 with a degree in Geography. She is the founder of Washed Up Cards, producing greetings cards that feature re-used plastic items found on beach cleans at the River Thames.
I absolutely love Scotland. I'd spent a lot of time growing up on various islands, like the Isle of Mull, and Skye. I've had so many amazing childhood memories in nature, like surfing, sailing, swimming – just loving the world we live in really and just wanting to learn more about it.
This inspired me and made me think that I wanted to work in sustainability, and to look after this amazing, natural world that we have. But it’s not really ours - we're just lucky enough to be here. We have to look after it, and because I've been so lucky to have had wonderful experiences in nature, I want it to be around for future generations. I feel this is where the real feelings and philosophy I have on sustainability and climate come from - that disconnection where if you haven't been lucky enough or privileged enough to have those lovely times in nature, you won't necessarily feel the need to protect it as much. So I think crucial to make nature more inclusive and to get more people loving it. David Attenborough said, “if you take care of nature, nature will take care of us”, and I really believe that.
I was already working in sustainability when the idea for Washed Up Cards was born. I was working for an amazing sustainable condiments company called Rubies in the Rubble (founded by fellow Edinburgh graduate, Jenny Costa) that makes lovely chutneys, relishes and ketchup from wonky and surplus fruit and veg. So their whole philosophy was taking something that's been discarded, and making something delicious out of it, which is really similar to the ethos of Washed Up Cards: taking someone else's rubbish and turning it into something useful.
During the pandemic, I was furloughed from Rubies in the Rubble and I took up beach cleaning at the River Thames. I really felt like I was helping to look after the environment and the river, and do my little bit to help fight plastic pollution. It was also a kind of therapy. I was feeling really spare - rudderless. I'm used to having lots of things going on in my life.
So I would go down to the river on my own, and I was expecting to find the big, bulky rubbish that you would expect, like plastic bottles and crisp packets and things like that. But it was the amount of microplastic that astounded and attracted me. I call it treasure - things like buttons, sequins, Lego and bottle caps. Those are the sorts of treasures that I was finding, and I thought they were so beautiful that I wanted to do something with them. So I made a greetings card for my sister – the very first Washed Up Card.
It grew from there. The whole idea was to try and tell a little story about the plastic on the front of the card. The people who I was sending them to in those early months loved them and loved the connection with the plastic, and the fact that they were raising awareness while spreading joy. So I just suddenly thought, I want to do this more. I started sharing my creations on Instagram to market them, and other people began joining me on the beach cleaning walks. In fact, I also have a surprising number of people who have written reviews saying that they've bought litter pickers after receiving one of my cards or that they’ve set up their own beach clean. So the cards really can amplify the message about the need to keep our rivers and beaches clean, and reduce plastic waste.
The whole business has grown very organically, and evolved very naturally. And I sometimes wish I had planned it more!. But there is also a beauty in things just unfolding, I guess.
I’ve also became a river action leader with the charity 10 to 21, and have organised over 50 beach cleans now. I've run sponsored cleans with the likes of Adidas, Lululemon, UBS and Ocean Bottle. I was also named a change maker for the future by the World Economic Forum, and was part of a Channel 4 documentary on upcycling, which had over 10 million views I had to make 3,000 cards off the back of that – that was quite intense!
I'm really trying to make Washed Up Cards a full-time thing. I currently have a job that I do two days a week, working for a nonprofit called In the Drink, which is trying to get pubs and bars along the River Thames to cut down on their single use plastic and offer more refill and reuse alternatives. So that's very connected to the concept behind the cards. And also, I want more people to make the cards with me. As adults we don't play enough, we don't create enough. Seeing people create their little masterpieces at workshops that I run as part of the beach cleans is great – they’re having real mindful moments while helping our local environment. To me, that’s the perfect combination.
All opinions expressed are those of the individuals being quoted and do not necessarily reflect those of the University of Edinburgh.
All photos courtesy of the respective interviewees except photo of Damian Carrington, courtesy of The Guardian.
Climate 75
Find out about more Edinburgh graduates who are leading the way in areas of sustainability, the environment and climate change on our Climate 75 website.