DENVER — A dedicated session at the Outdoor Retailer Summer Market showcased 4Ocean, the world’s largest ocean cleanup company, and its mission to reduce and clean up plastic pollution.

4Ocean extracts plastic pollution from the environment and turns that material into recycled bracelets. “The bracelet cord is made from recycled plastic water bottles and the beads are made from recycled glass bottles,” said 4Ocean spokeswoman Emilie Johnsen. “Some of that trash we collect from the ocean goes into our bracelets.”

They have pulled around 5 million pounds of plastic from the ocean and now have 300 paid employees. “For us, the ocean is our sanctuary and it’s what we want to protect,” Johnsen said.

Plastic pollution's impact on the world

Still, 4Ocean contends that no matter how much they clean, there will always be more plastic. It just comes right back. Instead of focusing on cleanup and recycling, the company urges people to focus on the reduction of plastic use in their day-to-day lives.

“Cities and counties all over the world were banning plastic straws (in 2018),” Johnsen said. “It’s great, but at the same time we cannot call ourselves eco-friendly if all we’re doing is refusing plastic straws. It is a drop in the bucket compared to everything that is out there.”

In addition to causing visual pollution, 4Ocean said plastic presents a significant threat to the environment, global economies and food security.

“Plastic is a threat to the environment, but what people may not be aware of is that plastic is also a global food security threat,” Johnsen said. “Scientists are now discovering it’s in our air that we’re breathing. It’s in our seafood. It’s in our human waste, our beer, our drinking water — it’s everywhere. We are losing the ability to have access to good, clean, toxin-free food.”

For global economies, plastic pollution also presents a threat to tourism, due to unclean beaches, and often represents a humanitarian issue. It often coincides with poverty and government corruption, as in countries 4Ocean works with, like Haiti.

Each United States citizen contributes an average of 4.5 pounds of waste every single day. Take that to a country like Haiti, which does not have a system in place to deal with waste. The result is that the waste ends up on the ground, in water bodies and on beaches.

“Many of these countries are losing millions of dollars in tourism every year because their beaches are so dirty,” Johnsen said.

She added that they are trying to create new global economies: “Trash has no value. But, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. We are trying to shift the paradigm of thinking that plastic pollution is worthless. We are using it as a resource, turning it into bracelets, and we’re trying to get companies on board with using ocean plastic instead of virgin plastic.”

Why is recycling unrealistic as a solution?

One key point that 4Ocean focuses on with education is helping people understand the seven different kinds of plastic and how recyclable they are. “People think that just because the universal recycling symbol is on a bottle, that means you can recycle it,” Johnsen said. “It does not do that, it just tells you what kind of plastic it is. Many plastics we use today cannot actually get recycled.”

For example, although straws are made of recyclable plastic they are not recyclable because their unique shape makes them susceptible to getting caught in recycling machines, according to Johnsen. The same goes for plastic bags, bubble wrap, plastic cutlery and more.

“Styrofoam is one of the worst of all plastics,” she added. “Not only does it make a mess, (but) it also is 99% air and just a little bit of a polystyrene. It's not usually recyclable, and it’s so crumbly and cheap that it often costs more to recycle it and make it into a new product than it does to just make more virgin material.”

Another surprisingly nonrecyclable item is the plastic in wrappers and packaging, according to Johnsen. Oftentimes packaging has a shiny inside, which means the outside of the wrapper is made of plastic but the interior is made of aluminum, and most municipal recycling facilities cannot separate the two materials and thus cannot recycle it.

Plastics 1, 2 and 5 are the commonly recyclable ones, but even if they are recycled that process is not indefinite. Most plastics are only recycled two or three times before they have to be thrown away because the quality has degraded too much.

Reduction and refusal as a solution

“Reduce, reduce, reduce and refuse,” Johnsen said. “Those are the things that are going to have the biggest impact."

4Oceans focused so much effort on Outdoor Retailer this year because it is looking to help employers and companies improve how things are made.

“Tiny steps can slowly grow until, eventually, we can have these companies completely rearranging the way they are manufacturing their products," Johnsen said.

"If every company were what we see here at Outdoor Retailer, we could really, truly make a difference,” she added. “We are the problem. We are also the solution.”

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