We are a purpose-driven business on a mission to end the ocean plastic crisis

4ocean is a Public Benefit Corporation and Certified B Corp. We are not a nonprofit and do not accept donations. Our organization is funded primarily by the sales of our products and each product sold helps remove one pound of trash from the ocean, rivers or coastlines.

We were founded on the belief that business can be a force for good and the actions of individual people, collectively, have the power to change the world. Our founders, Alex and Andrew, have been around the ocean their entire lives. They both grew up on the Florida coast, swimming, diving, fishing, and surfing. After becoming friends in college, they saved up their money for the surf trip of a lifetime to Bali. When they arrived, they found a beach that was completely covered in plastic, with trash-filled waves delivering more garbage with each break.

Every pound pulled is documented and tracked

They asked a local why such a popular, and otherwise beautiful, shoreline wasn’t kept clean, and were told that the beaches had been cleaned just hours earlier. The trash they were wading through had only just washed ashore. Their eyes were immediately opened to the magnitude of the ocean plastic crisis, and they vowed on the spot to try to do something about it. We take our cleanup operations seriously and always go the extra mile to ensure our crews are maximizing their impact. That’s why we document and track each and every pound of trash we recover.

What happens to the ocean plastic we recover?

Once it’s weighed, photographed, and documented, our recovered ocean plastic is transported to our regional operational bases where it’s sorted by type, color, and condition before being sent to our recycling partners for washing, flaking, and pelletizing. These pellets are what we use to manufacture new and existing 4ocean products like our Signature iPhone Case. While recycling is always our highest priority, there are certain materials that are just too contaminated, deterioried, or otherwise not feasible to recycle in certain countries. When this happens, we partner with various local facilities to find the most sustainable method of disposal.

The story of 4ocean Plastic™

4ocean is so committed to ending the ocean plastic crisis that we followed a plastic bottle 700 miles across the ocean to Haiti just to find out how it was getting in the ocean and what we could do to stop it. It’s been two years since then and 4ocean Haiti is now a fully operational cleanup division that’s recovering millions of pounds of plastic from the ocean. Since the very beginning, it’s been our goal to develop a closed-loop manufacturing process that uses the materials our professional cleanup crews recover from the ocean to develop new and innovative products that fund our global ocean cleanup operation and support a growing movement to end the world’s reliance on single-use plastic.