ACHIEVE YOUR BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY GOALS BY CLEANING THE OCEAN
A message from our CEO
Why partner with 4ocean?
Tangible, Traceable Impact
We ensure full transparency by thoroughly documenting and independently auditing every pound of plastic and trash we remove from the ocean, allowing partners to confidently verify their measurable impact on environmental change.
Turnkey Storytelling
Receive a turnkey marketing solution complete with a comprehensive suite of media resources and a dedicated account manager to effectively communicate your sustainability efforts and maximize the value of your partnership.
Unmatched Social Impact
We provide our full-time captains and crews with fair living wages, cover 100% of health insurance, and offer comprehensive benefits to empower communities to make a long-lasting environmental impact.
How to partner with 4ocean
Plastic Neutrality
Calculate your plastic footprint by measuring the total amount of plastic used in your products or services and go plastic neutral by removing the equivalent amount of plastic directly from the ocean, coastlines, and environment. We provide a comprehensive marketing toolkit complete with badges, media assets, photos, videos, and guides to communicate your impact to your customers.
Incorporate our unique One Pound Promise initiative into every product or service your company offers. With our one-to-one model, your business has the opportunity to remove a pound(s) of trash and plastic from the ocean for every product sold, every order fulfilled, every client onboarded, or every service rendered. This initiative offers a tangible means to connect your customers directly to the impact they are helping to create, allowing them to become active participants in ocean cleanup.
The 4ocean x Ecodrive platform offers businesses two distinct ways to launch a sustainability program: by integrating ocean cleanup efforts directly into their services or by allowing customers to contribute at checkout. Designed for seamless integration, this platform connects effortlessly with Shopify apps or APIs, ensuring that any business can quickly enhance its environmental impact and meet sustainability goals with minimal setup.
Recover a specific amount of plastic from the ocean and coastlines leveraging 4ocean captains and crew. This can be a one time activation or for a specific event or time of year such as Earth Day, World Ocean’s Day or International Coastal Cleanup Day to remove a specific amount of plastic and trash directly from the ocean and communicate your impact.
Our Corporate and Employee Gifting Program offers a unique opportunity to connect with your employees or clients. Enhance your brand's presence with our custom-designed corporate gift bracelets, featuring your co-branded logo for a memorable impact. Additionally, we provide options to offset the plastic footprint of each employee by removing plastic and trash from the ocean during holidays and special events.
“We're able to then take the 4ocean story to our retail partners, that really sets us apart. We're not just a single-ingredient dog chew, we're also an environmental friendly brand that's conscious of the environment and doing the right thing.”
Steve Mamak
Co-Founder + CEO
NatureGnaws
“Crunchi is at the forefront of the clean ocean movement, proudly standing as the first cosmetics company to partner with 4ocean. Their commitment to sustainability is further reinforced by achieving 4ocean Certified Plastic Neutral status.
Kelly Kreusler
Co-Founder
Crunchi
“The 4ocean partnership has gone directly into all of my sales presentations. And just to see how our retailer partners and the entire CPG community responds to it, It makes everyone light up.”
Daniel Goetz
Co-Founder + CEO
Goodpop
“As part of the USPA Life sustainability initiative, U.S. Polo Assn. partnered with us as a 4ocean Certified Cleanup Partner. To date, they have pulled more than 130,000 pounds of trash and plastic from the world’s oceans, rivers, and coastlines and have committed to another 80,000 pounds this year!”
Michael Prince
CEO, USPA Global Licensing
U.S. Polo Assn.
“Our collaboration with 4ocean isn't just about selling products; it's about forging a path towards sustainability and environmental restoration. With every purchase, Kitsch customers become agents of change, joining us in our commitment to cleaner oceans and a brighter future."
Cassandra Thurswell
Founder
KITSCH
Let's explore what's possible
Fill out this form to connect with our crew and discover how we can help you become a more sustainable business!
Your questions, answered
4ocean directly manages a global ocean cleanup operation and employs professional, full-time captains and crews to recover plastic from the world’s oceans, rivers, and coastlines seven days a week.
To offset your single-use plastic footprint, we recover an equivalent amount of plastic from the ocean for every pound of single-use plastic you consume.
Our Plastic Neutral Plan is based on the fact that the average person consumes 110 pounds of single-use plastic each year—that’s 9 pounds of single-use plastic every month.
If you consume more than 9 pounds of single-use plastic each month (or want to maximize your impact and pull more pounds than you consume), subscribe to our Plastic Negative Plan instead!
Our cleanup crews specialize in recovering plastic from the open ocean and environments where plastic is at high risk of entering the ocean. This includes rivers and coastal areas like sensitive mangrove forests, coral reefs, estuaries, and beaches.
Our cleanup crews recover all types of plastic, not just the high-value plastics that drive revenue. We also collect glass, metal, and any other man-made debris that doesn’t belong in the environment.
Every captain and crew member is a full-time 4ocean employee who gets paid a fair living wage. We also cover all health insurance costs as well as additional benefits and bonus incentives.
We own all of the vessels and equipment our crews need to do their jobs safely and effectively, which requires the up-front investment as well as regular maintenance costs.
We also prioritize the most sustainable types of waste management for recovered debris, but the most sustainable choice isn’t always the most economical choice.
Ultimately, we work hard to balance our triple bottom line of people, planet, and profit. Our ocean-first philosophy means our operational costs tend to be higher than comparable organizations.
This is especially true when you compare us to companies that utilize a collection center model for plastic recovery where volunteer trash pickers are only paid per-pound of high-value material collected.
When you offset your single-use plastic footprint with 4ocean, you’re directly funding a global cleanup operation that’s actively restoring the marine environment by removing plastic waste and other man-made debris from critical ocean, river, and coastal habitats while creating local, living-wage jobs for people whose lives and livelihoods are directly impacted by plastic pollution.
And that makes all the difference.
Absolutely! Eliminating unnecessary plastics from our lives will always be the best way to both decrease demand for virgin plastics and prevent plastic pollution. But we believe it’s important to acknowledge reality even as we strive toward our ideals.
Right now, the average person uses 110 pounds of single-use plastic every year. And it can be easy to blame people for their choices, but the truth is that sustainable options aren’t always the most accessible options.
Plastic has become so commonplace in our society that it’s often the most affordable choice. And sometimes, plastic products and packaging are the only choice—especially for folks with health issues and dietary restrictions.
That’s why we still need urgent and immediate action from our leaders in government, business, and media. They have the power to enact large-scale systemic changes that prevent plastic pollution at the source—like transitioning to the circular economy.
In this model of production and consumption, waste is viewed as a design flaw and products (or their material components) are sustainably sourced and easily and affordably repaired, recycled, or regenerated at the end of their useful life.
We actually started our Partnership program to help businesses transition to the circular economy, but large-scale change takes time to produce results.
4ocean’s Plastic Offset Plans are an interim solution that allows people to balance out the negative impact of plastics they can’t avoid right now while the global community works together to build a more sustainable future that’s accessible to everyone; a future where humanity grows alongside nature and not at its expense.
No, we’re not. We know it’s easy to mistake us for one because of our mission, but 4ocean is definitely a business. We’re just not a corporation whose only purpose is to maximize profit at any expense.
4ocean is an established Public Benefit Corporation. This is a legal structure for mission-focused businesses that provide a public benefit and operate sustainably. It means we’re not only empowered to prioritize our mission and impact alongside profit, but that we’re legally obligated to do so.
We’re also a Certified B Corp, which means the nonprofit B Lab has audited our entire business and certified that 4ocean meets the highest standards of social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability.
Our captains and crews are required to follow a strict documentation process that allows us to trace the origins and handling of each and every pound of trash we recover from the world’s oceans, rivers, and coastlines.
The following data is recorded for every single cleanup: date, location, duration, crew members involved, the weight of each sack of recovered debris, and the total weight of all trash collected. We also document every cleanup visually with before, during, and after photos to prove we’re recovering plastic directly from the environment (versus a landfill or collection center).
All recorded data and photos must be reviewed and verified by the location manager before they are uploaded to the 4ocean TrashTracker. If data is inaccurate or incomplete, or the photos don’t meet our rigorous documentation standards, they are not uploaded into the TrashTracker or counted toward our total pounds pulled.
The 4ocean TrashTracker is a proprietary digital system that’s regularly audited by third parties like the Better Business Bureau and GreenCircle Certified to ensure we’re maintaining the highest degree of transparency, accuracy, and accountability.
Nope! You don’t have to worry about that. We offset our company’s entire carbon footprint every year by restoring blue carbon ecosystems like coral reefs, kelp and mangrove forests, and coastal watersheds through our partnership with SeaTrees by Sustainable Surf.
This includes all of the activities we engage in to offset your plastic footprint.
In fact, we have been Ocean Positive Verified since 2018 which means we’ve gone beyond carbon neutrality and have had a net positive impact on the marine environment.
Recovered plastics are transported back to our local facilities where they are weighed, documented, washed, and sorted by type and color.
What happens next depends on the type of plastic:
Some plastics are shredded and/or recycled to create new 4ocean products that fund our mission.
Some plastics are taken to a local recycling center where they are processed into raw materials that other manufacturers can use to create new products without using virgin plastic.
Plastics that can’t be recycled may be extruded and used to create things like plastic lumber.
When we’ve exhausted every other option, materials at the end of their lifecycle are either responsibly landfilled or sent to the Solid Waste Authority in West Palm Beach, Florida—one of the most advanced, efficient, and low-emission waste management facilities in the United States—where it’s converted into energy that powers thousands of homes and businesses in our local community.
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