Your plastic footprint is the total weight of all the plastic you produce, consume, and/or discard in a specific timeframe. Individuals, businesses, governments, and even products can have a plastic footprint. 

Plastic offsetting is the act of balancing the negative impact of your plastic footprint by supporting projects that have a positive social and environmental impact. 4ocean calculates and offsets your plastic footprint by removing one pound of plastic from the ocean for each pound of plastic you produce, consume, and discard annually.

You are considered plastic neutral when you offset your entire plastic footprint. Generally, a company will offset their plastic footprint annually.

However, a truly plastic neutral company would also calculate their plastic footprint for every year they’ve been operational and offset that as well.

Apply to become a 4ocean Plastic Neutral Partner. If you’re approved, we’ll walk you through every step of this process and calculate your plastic footprint for you.

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 plastic footprint, we recover an equivalent amount of plastic waste from the world’s oceans, rivers, and coastlines for every pound of plastic you produce, consume, and discard.

No. Plastic offsets cannot replace the impact of a robust long-term sustainability plan that reduces or eliminates virgin plastics in your supply chain, completely phases out single-use plastic packaging, drives consumer demand for products made with recycled content, and invests directly in circular infrastructure.

Our Plastic Neutral Certification is an interim solution to sustainability that allows you to offset your plastic footprint and balance out the negative impact of the plastics you can’t avoid using while you work to transition into the circular economy.

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 own 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 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.

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.