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.

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. We offset your plastic footprint by recovering one pound of plastic from these environments for each 4ocean Plastic Credit you purchase.

4ocean is headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, and has cleanup divisions in Florida, Hawai'i, Indonesia and Guatemala.

Recovered plastics are transported back to our local facilities where they are weighed, documented, and sorted by type and color. What happens next depends on the type of plastic. Some plastics are recycled to create new 4ocean products. Some plastics are taken to a local recycling center for processing so they can become other kinds of products. 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 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.

Our crews follow a meticulous documentation process that allows us to track each and every pound of trash we recover back to its original source. Not only can we tell you when and where our plastic was recovered, we can also tell you which members of our crew recovered it and what tools and vessels were used to do it. The following data is recorded for every single cleanup mission: date, location, duration, crew members involved, the weight of each sack of recovered debris, the total weight of all trash collected, and the signatures of the person recording the data and the location manager that reviews that data. We also document every cleanup visually with before, during, and after photos that guarantee our recovery efforts have a direct impact on the environment. All data and photographs are uploaded to the 4ocean TrashTracker™, a proprietary digital system that provides full transparency and traceability for all of our recovered materials. The TrashTracker™ is audited and verified quarterly by the Better Business Bureau.

No. 4ocean Plastic Credits are an interim solution to sustainability that allows you to offset your plastic footprint and achieve plastic neutrality in the short term. Plastic credits 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.

It’s highly likely that you still have a plastic footprint. Your plastic footprint includes all of the plastic you use in the normal course of business operations. All of the plastic you use to provide your service and handle administrative activities counts toward your plastic footprint.

You can get certified in one of four ways depending on your goals. Each certification comes with a media toolkit that makes it easy to share your impact with consumers, investors, and key stakeholders.

Talk to us! Shoot us an email at info@4ocean.com