4ocean cleans up record-breaking 30 million pounds of ocean plastic

4ocean has set the world record for most trash collected from our oceans by a single organisation — a whopping 30 million pounds and counting. To celebrate this achievement, let’s take a detailed look at the organisation’s journey.

You’d be hard pressed to find a beach that doesn’t have various sized pieces of plastic littering its shorelines these days, but one amazing organisation is on a mission to make that reality a thing of the past.

The team at 4ocean has broken the world record for collecting the most amount of ocean pollution by a single organisation. Retrieving 30 million pounds of waste from the sea has been no easy feat — and it all started with two guys on a surfing holiday.

In 2015, Alex Schulze and Andrew Cooper noticed the high level of ocean plastic pollution while catching waves in Bali, Indonesia.

The pair with local fishermen about the impact that plastic was having on their livelihoods, and soon realized they could build a business that paid captains and crews to recover man-made waste from the ocean instead of catching fish.