Gyre Seacleaner - Ocean Trash to Watch Case?

[thesingularity7]

Video Review - https://youtu.be/Y3cUwWdPR-U

This watch, and this review, might come off as a slightly out of place, since it isn't like anything else I've reviewed before. Gyre is a brand based out of the Netherlands, and they were on Kickstarter in June 2020 to try and launch the Seacleaner project. Their goal was to create a watch out of recycled plastic, and the plastic would be collected as part of the larger ocean cleanup effort. 'Ghost nets', i.e discarded fishing nets, are collected and sold to recycling facilities that turn it into plastic pellets, which eventually get made into these watch cases. These ghost nets are collected from the Indian Ocean Gyre, and an extra 5% of the profits were promised to be donated to the Ocean Cleanup Foundation. Additionally, The NATO strap is made entirely out of recycled plastic bottles.

As a watch enthusiast, I liked this idea and respect this noble cause. Gyre are not the only players in the game with this idea, and Alpina released a similar watch, the Seastrong Gyre, last year for around $1500. Smaller names in the watch industry, like TRIWA and Tom Ford also have similar watches, at $150 and $1000 respectively.

This is also the first Kickstarter watch project I've ever backed. I usually don't do this because I'd rather not tie up my money for 6-8 months, but this is a cause I was happy to support, and given the $250 price of this watch, I was comfortable with forgetting about it for a while. If you're not a watch person, and you backed this project and received your watch, I'm sure you're thrilled with it; you got to support an interesting cause, and you got a neat watch out of it. But since I'm a self proclaimed watch critic that thrives on nitpicking at watches, I thought I'd take a closer look at this to see how good the watch actually is.