I Have Never Seen Anything Like This

Welcome back to 4ocean. My name is Alex and we employ captains and crews around the world to clean the ocean. Today we're going to be taking you guys to a gnarly, gnarly polluted coastline. We're going to clean it up with our Java team. So we're here at our Java location and this is actually my first time being able to meet the team so I'm very, very excited. We got everybody here. I'm walking up and look at everybody already. There's the whole Java team. What's happening guys? How are you? So this is 4ocean Java. We've got our whole team here. We're all ready to rock and roll. We've got a couple different operations that we do here. We clean the river. We've got a vessel out here as well as cleaning coastlines. So we'll give you guys a tour today. We're going to go to one of those super gnarly polluted coastlines and we're going to spend some time with these local legends. Very excited. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Sorry, I'm not good with names. Everybody. Yes, how are you? If I missed anybody, come grab me. Come grab me. Nice to meet you. Oh, two times. Two times. I got you. Okay. It's a pleasure to be here and to be able to meet all of you. I've really looked forward to it. I've been seeing all the impact that you guys have been making every single day and we in Florida are very excited to be here and excited to clean with you. Thank you guys very much for the hard work that you do. I know how difficult it is to clean plastic and I know how polluted the coastlines are. So I know how hard you work. So thank you very, very much. It's mental. Every location has their different, the different ----, the different vibe. I love it. I love it. Got some breakfast for everybody here. All right, let's look at the spread. This is incredible. It's from pineapple. Pineapple. Strawberry. Yep. And something like the Wow, man. The spread looks incredible. I love that everything is wrapped in banana leaves, no plastic, all fresh local fruit. That right there is good clean living. So we just finished up some breakfast with everybody and now this is the lead head honcho here in the job facility. This is Mr. Johan. Johan. Johan, my man. Okay. And then we've got Ranga who's going to translate for us. So want to give you guys a quick tour through the facility so you can see what happens here at the forest and Java facility and give you guys a little sneak peek. So let's go inside. Yeah. Cool. So how big is the building here? 50 times 80. 50 times 80 meters. Okay. So this is the facility, right? So this is your primary area here in Java and and let's walk through you say. So like talk to me about this. What is your system here? Schedule. Schedule. Okay. So this is your daily schedule. You've got river boom one, two, three, river team, beach team, the route, the time spot start. Yeah. And this is pounds. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So like attendance list. That's what you're tracking every single week. Is the office office? Okay. Let's check this out. The one thing that's funny is I literally, everything is branded so well, everywhere for Mr. Bali. I was like, Oh, check that out. The first aid kit. I got a nice little sticker on it. Nope. Nope. That's engraved. That's literally CNC engraved with some blue paint. Let me custom a first aid kit. That's a prime, but yeah, we've got the office here. This is got everything computer security systems. We, uh, we do our zooms. So we'll do our, our, uh, our nighttime zooms with everybody, uh, with the full company lives. We've got a little rolling cart here. This is where everybody does the, uh, trash tracker enter. So this is where you can put all the data and do everything. How you doing? Yeah. And then gear storage. And I saw earlier, this is where everybody's hanging up the, uh, the, the waiters. Yes. Okay. So the waiters are going here. You got the boot drying rack here. That's dialed in right there. So these are a little forest and skiffs, huh? Mini skiffs. I love it. Okay. And what do you guys primarily use these for? Explore the river and collect plastic from the systems. So these are smaller plastic boats. These are used to clean and plastic from our boom systems and the rivers. These are amazing because they're lightweight. You can throw them in the back of those little baby forest and trucks. We can get all the plastic and we can be mobile agile hospitality. So we've got four of these guys. So tell me about this. What is the purpose of this identification? So this is what we're using to educate our staff here to help them understand what are the different types of plastic and how do we sort them? So that's, as I mentioned constantly, the only way to recycle is to effectively sort and clean the items thoroughly. So this is just educating everybody on, you know, what we're doing, what places of plastic are what and helping them to sort. This is our certification scale. This is per wing. Okay. The result of the sort presentation. So you'll wait here and this is the result. So everything goes back here, sort it. Then it comes here. This is Wade. And then this is all the plastic ready to go back to Jembrana. Yes. Okay. Okay. So the quality plastic that we're ready to recycle everything that's good to go. So let's take a look back here at our sorting facility. So this is where the plastic will come in. We've got a little bit of a process flow. The trucks will come in from over here. They'll back up. They'll offload the plastic here. This is where it's all sorted. It's all prepared. And then it's brought into the facility. Anything else that goes on here? It's mainly sorted. So these are mountains of styrofoam. This is all the styrofoam that we're collecting. We're putting a lot of that in the rivers, the single use plastic containers, all the foam, the floats, things like that. It's a smaller operation. You know, I explained this as like, we have satellite locations that are located in these different areas. And we do that to try and be more efficient with, with just having small pinpoints to go after these hot spots. But you back up the truck, you offload the plastic, it gets sorted. It gets Wade. We've got our office, the team manages it. And this is Porsche and Java. Now it's time to clean. Ready? Ready. My man. Okay. That's Johan, local legend. So now we're going to load up all the trucks, all the gear. We're going to get everybody rocking and rolling. We're going to go hit that super gnarly beach and go try and get it cleaned up. Y'all let's do it. You ready? Ready. Okay. We're going to load up in the trucks. And what we're doing right now is we're loading up into these little trucks here, little mini trucks. We're going to cruise to this beach. And this is one of the, thank you guys. This is one of the gnarly, gnarly polluted beaches. So what we do on a typical cleanup is we'll load up in our trucks. We'll get, if we're going to the river, we'll get the boats. We'll get all our gear and we're going to go there and we're going to clean up all this plastic. So what we'll do is we'll be cruising the beach. We'll put it into these white rice sacks. So these are reusable rice sacks that actually you can see right here behind me over by Don Biggity. These are white rice sacks that we'll be filling up and then we're going to bring them back to the facility. So this is what a typical cleanup operation looks like with our captains and crew. Cleaning up coastlines, cleaning up, you know, rivers, cleaning up the ocean. It's going to be a good day. I'm fired up. All right. We'll see you on the dirty beach, my man. See you. See you soon. And we're off, baby. What is this? Sardines. So a lot of industries here is fishing. They have all the experience, the expertise, time spent on the water and now they can use those same skill sets that translate into collecting plastic. So we're basically trying to pay fishermen to collect plastic instead of catching fish. We're here. Okay, we got the last little bit of people here. We've got the squad and now we're getting ready to go check out this beach. This is supposed to be a very gnarly, dirty beach. We've got the whole squad. Everybody's ready. Oh my gosh. Look at this. What? This is insane. Oh my gosh. A lot of location like this in Java, huh? This is crazy. This is absolutely insane. There's millions of pounds on this coastline right here. It's time to get after it. I'll tell you what. Wow. Holy hell. It's crazy. Dirty. There's the ocean. It's the riverbank. Wow. Dude, this is so heavy. I mean, what are you thinking, Dom? I've never seen so much trash in my life. Like, this is unreal. All right, we're gonna start punching the clock. It's game time. Yeah. Just pulled out this big net and look at how deep this goes. It's like three, four, five feet deep. All just plastic. There you go, guys. Nice work, y'all. Okay, we got a tire. Packed with goodies. Telling you, I'll look on life, but that's gnarly. That's gnarly. So much plastic here. This is a plastic emergency for sure. Looking sharp, looking fresh. These for you? There you go, my man. What's your name? My name is Pietra. Pietra? Yes. Pietra Alex. Nice to meet you, buddy. A lot of spiders, huh? Spiders? Yeah, yeah. Spider. Look at this. This is madness. This is insane. So we're tying up these bags to make them easier to transport, make sure all the plastic doesn't fall out. The loop, swoop, and pull. My man. I'm just outside Bali, and I am on a heavily, heavily polluted coastline. Behind me, you can see just millions of pounds of plastic. This plastic goes down about five, seven feet deep. We're right in this local fishing village here, right on the ocean, and this is mind-melting the amount of plastic that's here. This just goes to show that we've got to find sustainable alternatives to single-use plastic. We know 100% that all of our captains and crew, we're working hard, we're trying to clean up this plastic, but we know that that's not going to end the ocean plastic crisis. If we clean up this entire beach, if we sit here and work for two months cleaning it up, next week, the next tide might bring in a whole nother wash of plastic, and we know that cleaning plastic alone will not end the ocean plastic crisis. We've got to drive sustainable solutions and try and find alternatives for single-use plastics because everything on this beach is basically single-use plastic. We know that driving awareness and the cleanups, the cleanups are an amazing way to drive awareness and get people aware of the problem and know what's happening, but we know it's not going to end this. So, we say it a lot that cleaning the ocean alone will not end the ocean plastic crisis. We've got to find sustainable alternatives, but our hope is that we can drive that awareness through videos, through sharing these stories, sharing the impact that our cappins are having every day, and hopefully we can have some influence. I know that governments, brands, corporations, everybody has their part to play in this problem right here, but I do think that we as consumers have a chance to generate that snowball effect, generate the momentum, because if we can all vote with our dollar, speak up, make sustainability cool, make cutting down on single-use plastic cool, then we can create that snowball effect where governments will be receptive, brands will be receptive. I mean, if we're creating the financial incentive for corporations producing plastic, they'll have a means to, hey, what else can we do for consumers and just driving that demand. So, I really do believe that consumers are the tip of the spear and the movement is what's truly going to drive a massive change around the world because this right here, it's mental. It's overwhelming, but I can tell you right now, we're not going to stop till the ocean's clean. Cheers. What we're doing now is we are bringing all of these super sacks that we collected back to the truck. So, we're going to load all these up, get them back in the Yeah. So, we use these rice sacks. A lot of people ask us if these are single-use plastic bags and we use these reusable rice sacks because they're small, they're reusable, they're easily manageable, and you can move them around. If we have those giant super sacks, those things weigh a few hundred pounds and they're very hard to transport. So, we've got these guys that you can do it individually. Yeah. Two hours of cleaning. Yeah, my man. Yeah, buddy. All right. Bring it in, baby. Give me five. Give me five. We just finished cleaning. We're wrapping up. You know, it's time to hit lunch. So, we've been cleaning for a few hours and now we're going to go grab some lunch and then hit the river. So, we got to bring this plastic back up and load it into the trucks. We got a staggered group photo with everybody. We got the drone out. Nice. There you go, boys. Yeah, man. Nice work. So, that was a few hours of cleanup there. It's hot. Like I said, at times it can feel overwhelming because look at the coastlines in the back here. It's going to be a huge, huge project. We got to stop it from ending up on the coastline in the first place and we got to try and clean this stuff up. We've been here at Tratas Beach cleaning for a few hours the whole morning and it's lunchtime now and so we got all this plastic bagged up. We're going to bring it back to our facility to sort and prepare for future recycling but behind me, it's still so heavy. There's still so much plastic. This is going to be a huge, huge project but we're determined. We're going to keep at it and now we're going to get this plastic back to the shop and we're going to go have some lunch and then we're going to go clean up a river. You guys ready? Let's load it up. Let's do it. Yeah, buddy. Working up them calories, man. We got to get some nasi goreng, local Indonesian food. These are beefy. We got the truck loaded up. It's a big accomplishment with the team. We're going to have to be doing this a crazy amount at that location to get it cleaned up and we're stoked. These guys are stoked. Everybody's fired up but we're going to keep it rolling. I'm back with the boys. I'm back with the boys. All right, man in the 50 cal. Yes, man in the 50 cal. Here we go. It's pretty overwhelming. I got to be honest with you. That's a gnarly beach. I know there's been a lot of different groups that have been out there cleaning up and it's tough to get it clean. A lot that goes into that. We're going to brainstorm, see if we could tackle that and just keep cleaning that area, get it cleaned up but one of the things is all that plastic is being brought there from somewhere. We're just talking about it. It's like, yes, we want to clean it up but also it might be beneficial to target the areas. It might be the river right next to it or the different areas. We want to stop the plastic so that we don't clean up that beach, spend a month, two months cleaning it and then just overnight it reloads the plastic. We're going to spend some time. We're going to put our brains together, think through it, see what we can do. But first, lunch. We're back at the facility and it looks like we've got a nice lunch prepared. My man. My guy. Hello, ladies. How are you? Good to see you. Look at this. This looks incredible. Wow. All sorts of stuff. Wow. Very nice. Delicious. We got a little wash station. Nice. What is that, a bro pad? Yeah. I love it. Ready for some lunch? Yeah. Good morning. Game time. Good morning. We're always trying to eat with the crew, but one thing we try to do is eat with the crew. I understand that at times it's customary age differences and employment levels, managers, bosses, people sit separate. But for us, we only get a few days to spend with the team. So that's why at every cleanup, we're trying to come in a little early, do a big team lunch so that we can sit and have a meal together, but then sit together, just relax and eat together. It's super important to spend some time as a team and be able to do something besides just cleaning plastic. Just kind of humanize it a little bit. It's a great connected team and this food is fantastic. So on the way back to the truck, I'm sitting there, I was using Google Translate and I'm talking for like probably 15 minutes. We're having full-on conversations and like they were understanding what I was saying, but then he just stops me and goes, Hey, uh, we speak Javanese, not Balinese. So I'm sitting here translating in a completely different language. I was like, Oh man, I'm so sorry. Group of bachelors. Everybody's like 22 to 31. Only one dude was married with the baby. Everybody else was single. I told them, I told them we put them on social media. Hopefully a lot of pretty girls would see them. They loved it. Lunch was fantastic. And now it's time to hit the river. Let's go. We're going to Pampan. So we're going to head to the river. Uh, this is the Pampan river. You guys may have seen, if you follow our email newsletter, by the way, you should check out that newsletter. It's awesome. Uh, we give you guys updates from the field, everything that's going on here at Four Ocean, but that was where the story, uh, trash is in the trees. What happened was there was a large flood and the water, the water level rose so high. And then it went down that when the water receded, there was massive amounts of plastic in the trees, all sorts of past plastic bags and, and, uh, and thin film. And like, they're like bamboo, little prickly types of trees. So it was very difficult to clean, but we're going to go to that river and we're going to throw on the waiters. We're going to get in, uh, and, and do some cleaning and show you guys what our river operations look like here in Java. We're going to do the bro pad. We're better than good. My man, we got a delicious, delicious meal. We're going to go clean the river. We got legends like this. So the waste issue is, is very complex and everyone always asks, where is the plastic coming from? And so a lot of this plastic is coming from land-based sources. You know, you have these different areas right now we're in Java, which is just outside Bali. And there's not a lot of waste management infrastructure. And so what happens is people are consuming these materials, these single use items. You saw a lot of what we cleaned this morning and I'm at a market here. So this is just a little market in a, in a little downtown area and take a look at behind me. So all of this is in single use plastic. They're like individually wrapped items and, uh, there, there's just a ton of single use plastic. So a lot of these items are being consumed and they don't really have waste management infrastructure here. And so what's happening is it's ending up in the streets. It's ending up in the gutters. It's ending up in the rivers. And when it rains, all of that material is being flushed out into the ocean. And like I said, it's a very complex issue because it is, you know, a lot of these, these families don't have the means to buy large bottles of shampoo, large servings of coffee. You know, a lot of them will literally purchase one individual single packet. And so a lot of that's what's ending up in these rivers. And that's what's ending up down in the ocean. So it's a pretty complex issue. It's not as easy as just like, Hey, just cut out single use plastic. Um, you know, there's going to be a lot innovation that has to happen in the packaging sector, um, as well as finding ways to cut down on that. So that's just something that we, uh, we try and bring awareness to and, and just talk about that, but we're heading down to the river now. All right. Wow. Look at this, man. That's what we were talking about guys. The trash is in the trees. This is so wild. You could see all the bags that are stuck in there. That's what happens when this river rises in this bamboo. Let's show you guys. It's very, uh, prickly. It's got little, little thorns on it. So everything's just getting caught. That's crazy. River team rocks, the waders and these guys keep you dry. So they're completely sealed all the way up to your chest. So you can clean, you can go in the river and you can get Okay. You might've seen all that viral footage of the trash in the trees and I'm here with the team and I'm able to see it firsthand. And it's crazy. You know, what happens is on the Pangpang river, that's this river that we're on right now. The water level is very low. So we are in their winter or their dry season during the summer. It's the rainy season and it's the monsoon season. So what happens is this river goes from, you know, how low it is right now. The water level rises significantly. And during those heavy floods, that's when all this trash is, is being pushed out the rivers. And that's how you're getting plastic like this in the trees. So it's, it's wild to see it firsthand. I mean, it takes so much attention and it's so much energy to recover it because these bamboo trees have literally like almost like little thorns or little, uh, little prickly, just, just thorns that hold onto that plastic very tight. So you have to pull each individual piece out. It's very, very labor intensive. It's crazy, crazy tough, but it's all just thin film and LDPE bags, all that stuff, all single use plastics that's getting caught in the trees. How long would it take for this? Um, Dika said like three hours, four hours, three or four hours just for this one tree. Wow. Oh, we have to be more careful, right? Yeah. Lots of thorns. Yes. So we can't be like fast. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Let me show you what I mean by the thorns. So it's all wrapped. You have to pull so hard on this stuff that it's just covered in dirt, a water bag. This is crazy. It's a rain in plastic. They were saying that they regularly find snakes in the stuff. Like they'll even get back to the base and be unpacking stuff. And there's like snakes in the bags. Yeah. Cause they're wrapped up and can't even see them. Yeah. That's what I'm talking about right there. Nice man. What do you say guys? Yeah, buddy. My man. All right. Let's see what we got here. Yeah. See how gnarly this is? Debris. Before we leave, we got to take a photo with these local legends. I got to get a, get a group photo. Get on in here with your boys, with your boys, with my boy, the bachelor, the bachelor here. We're up in the tree and it's gnarly. This is not easy work. You can see what I was talking about with all the thorns. All this stuff is just like caught in there. Very, very hard to pull out. They said there were a bunch of snakes that they're finding in here. I don't doubt. I'm seeing spiders and stuff crawling around, but it's wild. Look at all this stuff in here, man. Literally got a mask, a piece of a soda can. Not an easy task. Yeah, buddy. Yeah. That's gnarly, dude. It's not easy work. I can tell you that. The amount of trash that's in these trees is like, it's mind blowing and you have to work so hard to pull each one of those pieces out. It's not like you can just come up and just grab it. You know, yes, there is a lot of plastic in Indonesia, but some of it is very, very hard to collect. Look at this. Here's a nice, peaceful river. Really calm. It's serene. This would be a good spot to like set up a hammock or just read a book, just hang out. And then a couple steps away is pure pandemonium. Chaos. So much trash in the trees here. We got to clean, then we set up a hammock, then we read a book, take a little snooze. Work first, work hard, then play hard. We're cleaning up all types of plastic. So this is not just the giant, heavy stuff. We're cleaning up even the light. Like all this weighs almost nothing. It's like light as air. And it's very hard to recover out of these trees. But our captains and crew are working hard to cover all this debris and trying to get as much stuff as we can out of the environment. Because we're right here on the river and right down the way, this leads straight to the ocean. And that's where a lot of this stuff is ending up in the ocean. What's happened at one time? My man. Let's grab this plastic. We'll get it loaded up to the truck and we're going to call this a day. This little bear, this little bear. I think it means be careful. Caution, caution. Yeah, buddy. Hey guys, how are you? Hi. Yeah, buddy. 10 pack right there. Can't stress enough. It's so cool being able to get out to these places, being able to travel and see our teams. Just new international areas. You get to expose yourself to a lot of different stuff and see some really cool things. Is that all the stuff? Are we good? That's it. Ready to rock. We're clean, okay. Oh man, these waders are like a sauna suit. The back, I'm just like swooshing around. Yeah, they are definitely unquestionable. No, no, no. Hello, Mr. Dragon. I'm just sweating my butt off, but I'm trying to get these waders. All right guys, we'll see you later. My man. Legends, legends. Every pound of plastic that we collect is tracked and documented. So you may have seen some of the crew members out in the field today snapping photos on an iPhone. And what they're doing is they're taking photos of before, during, and after the cleanups. And then once we get back to our facility, we are weighing each individual super sack and then taking a photo of that super sack to show the plastic that's been collected. So they're getting weights. He's literally taking a photo of each one. And then right here on this board, we've got all the weights of each individual super sack. So we're filling out all the content, all the data, everything from our cleanups and tracking every single pound. And we have photos of every pound of food. So that's one thing that we're doing to try and create transparency behind our cleanups and show all the plastic that's been collected all around the world. That was every single step that we do to track every pound. So you guys have had a chance to see the cleanup operations. You saw the river operations. You got to see what these local legends are like. Amazing. And so guys, if you're liking this content, please don't forget to like, comment, share, subscribe, all the above. Just show us some love because you are actually showing all of these captains and crews some love. So thank you guys so much for following along. We're super stoked to bring you guys all the behind the scenes footage of our cleanup operations around the world. And we're not going to stop until the ocean is clean y'all.