Connection Thursday: the people pulling plastic out of Bali’s rivers
Care for skin and care for a place are the same instinct, followed to different ends. On Connection Thursday we introduce the people we work alongside, and today we want you to meet the ones standing knee-deep in Bali’s rivers, pulling out what the rest of us threw away. Their name is Sungai Watch, and their work sits closer to the heart of a natural brand than it might first appear.
Who Sungai Watch is
Sungai means river in Indonesian, and that is the whole mission in one word. Led by Gary and a growing team of local cleanup crews, Sungai Watch builds simple barriers across waterways, then hauls out the plastic by hand before it reaches the sea. It is unglamorous, repetitive, deeply physical work. It is also some of the most honest environmental work happening on the island, because every gram they log is a gram they actually lifted, sorted, and recorded.
What the numbers say
We ran a soap weekend with them on 28 to 29 March 2026, and 100 percent of the soap profit went to their work. That weekend alone helped remove 625 kg of plastic from Bali’s rivers. Right now their biggest campaign is a relay run of roughly 1,200 km from Bali to Jakarta, raising one million US dollars to protect Indonesia’s rivers. These are not soft, rounded promises. They are counted kilograms and measured kilometres, which is the only kind of proof we trust.
Why a skincare brand cares about a river
A bottle of body oil and a plastic bag in a river are part of the same story: what we make, and where it ends up. This is the reason our refill stations have run since day one, and why we count the bottles we keep out of landfill, 2,245 of them in 2025. Reducing the plastic we put into the world and supporting the people who remove the plastic already there are two halves of one honest answer to a fair question, which is where does any of this actually go.
If today’s post moved something in you, the smallest place to start is your own bathroom shelf. Choose a refillable format over a new bottle, learn the names of the people behind the products you buy, and, when you can, back the crews doing the unphotogenic work. We will keep introducing them here, one Thursday at a time. You can meet another of our partners in the forests of Kalimantan, where our illipe butter begins.
