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Consider this. 40% of all plastics that are produced today are just thrown away within a month of acquisition. Only 10% of all plastic waste is recycled – which means 90% is not. And 32% of all plastic waste ends up in nature, including our oceans. 9-14 million tons of plastic waste is dumped into the oceans every year. That’s 17 tons per minute – a garbage truck’s worth of plastic waste dumped into the oceans each minute. 

And, this problem is only growing. It is estimated that by 2040, between 23—37 million tons of plastic waste will make its way into our oceans each year. This has real and tangible impacts – all negative – on us, the world’s wildlife, particularly marine wildlife, and our atmosphere.

Today I’m talking to Elise d'Epenoux, head of internal communications for SeaCleaners – an organization whose sole mission is to work toward pollution-free oceans, and they do so by employing some really unique strategies. They educate, they innovate, and they coordinate. Elize explains this work of SeaCleaners, and some of the more interesting and entrepreneurial projects they’ve got underway, including the Manta innovation – a first of its kind processing ship that literally trolls the seas and collects, treats, and repurposes floating plastic debris, and the Mobula Against Plastic Pollution (or MAPP) program, which unites partner organizations, governments, communities, researchers, and technical experts to implement clean-up operations on inland waters and onland activities to combat plastic pollution. We also talk about the scale of the problem, why it matters, and what we all can be doing in our daily lives to mitigate some of the worst impacts of plastic pollution upstream before it becomes a catastrophe downstream. 

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