Fish Reef Project selected to offset reef damage by sunscreen
Bay Area prosecutor accuses Banana Boat, Hawaiian Tropic, Sun Bum and Supergoop sunscreen makers of false advertisement.
A Bay Area district attorney’s office is successfully challenging sunscreen companies to change how they advertise their products, and an unexpected benefactor from one of the settled lawsuits is a California nonprofit that’s restoring ocean reefs on the Central Coast.
The Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office settled a pair of lawsuits in recent months against two major sunscreen companies that claimed their products were “reef friendly” or “reef safe” in advertisements.
Earlier this month, Santa Clara prosecutors settled a civil lawsuit for $350,000 against Supergoop for allegedly misleading consumers, and in May, Sun Bum was ordered to pay $300,000 in civil penalties. Both companies can no longer advertise that their chemical sunscreens are harmless to marine environments. They must also contact every California retailer that sold their products and ask that they cover up the references to reef safety with a sticker.
As part of the settlement, Sun Bum must pay $25,000 to a Santa Barbara-based nonprofit called Fish Reef Project. The organization — which owes its start to a $10,000 donation from the late “SpongeBob SquarePants” creator Stephen Hillenburg — is in the midst of a massive reef restoration effort off the coast of Goleta. Its founder and CEO Chris Goldblatt told SFGATE that they’ve received the court-ordered settlement and that the money is supporting their ongoing effort to expand an artificial sea cave into a 65-acre kelp forest using concrete domes.
“I think credit goes to the DA and the people at Sun Bum who were wise enough to pick a project focused solely on guaranteed outcomes,” Goldblatt said. “It’s about outcomes — not potential or platitudes. It’s about what you did to restore the ocean. It’s about enhancing what’s already working.”
Now, the DA’s office is suing Edgewell, the country’s largest sun care manufacturer, over its Banana Boat and Hawaiian Tropic sunscreens. Prosecutors allege that the sunscreens use chemicals that are harmful to reefs and that the company misled consumers with claims not supported by research.
A Santa Clara County judge is set to hear the case against Edgewell later this summer.
“After looking into it, we found it was the case — that advertising was misleading,” Christopher Judge, deputy district attorney for Santa Clara County, told SFGATE.
In the suit against Edgewell, the district attorney’s office wrote that the company did not conduct scientific studies or research on ingredients used in its sunscreens to confirm they weren’t harmful to reefs.
For instance, prosecutors said that the company claimed its sunscreens were “reef friendly” while using avobenzone as a UV filter. The suit said that avobenzone shares “structural similarity” with another chemical called oxybenzone, which was banned by the Hawaii Legislature in 2018 for how it negatively impacted marine environments.
“Not only was the ‘reef friendly’ claim by Defendants a scientifically unsupported one, the actual scientific evidence and public legislation pointed strongly to the opposite conclusion — that the active ingredients in Hawaiian Tropic and Banana Boat chemical sunscreens were demonstrably harmful (i.e., ‘unfriendly’) to reefs, including coral reefs,” the lawsuit said.
Judge said the lawsuit against Edgewell is a “contested case” and that a complex civil litigation judge in Santa Clara County is scheduled to evaluate it in late July.
“If there is a settlement, it’ll be public like the other two,” he said. “If a consumer goes into Google and types ‘Is x-y sunscreen reef safe and friendly?’ Well, there’s going to be a lot of information there … the consumer has the opportunity to become educated on what’s going on.”
