What is TeamSeas?
TeamSeas is a campaign about removing trash from our ocean, river, beaches, and its target was to hit 30 million USD. Each 1 USD represents 1 pound of trash being removed. Its mainly being led by the popular content creators MrBeast and Mark Robert.
How did it begin?
When Mrbeast hit a big milestone in 2019 reaching 20 million subscribers on youtube, he decided to team up with Mark Rober to make a campaign called TeamTrees. The goal was to plant 20 million trees. Each 1 USD represented 1 tree being planted. They worked on the campaign for about 5 months and organized a big wave of Youtube videos. A lot of influencers decided to join and post a video about #TeamTrees and why you should donate. Although it reached its goal in December of 2019, it’s still going strong with around 23.6 million donations. Even tho planting 20 million trees will not be solving climate change, it’s going to be a part of the solution and bring awareness.
How are they actually going to remove 30 million pounds of trash?
Items such as cans, glass, and plastic beverage bottles will be separated and recycled. If in some situations recycling will not be possible it will go to a proper disposal site in accordance with local regulations and capacity. That’s why we need to reduce the amount of plastic we use and the waste we generate.
Half of the money goes to “THE OCEAN CLEANUP” to make a lot of these trash-eating robots and the other half will go to “Ocean Conservancy”. The Ocean Conservancy team will be focusing on the beach clean-up section mainly and then actually going out to the sea and cleaning up a bunch of trash there as well. “THE OCEAN CLEANUP” company has these boats called ‘The Interceptor’. It’s basically a 50-ton trash-eating robot!
The idea is to put these trash-eating robots on those worst offending rivers and that will go a long way to fixing the problem at the source.
The great part is these river interceptor robots actually make a big impact. First, they anchor it to the river as trash floats down the river and it runs into a barrier, then floats to the inside of the interceptor, where there is a conveyor belt, which continuously extracts the debris from the water and delivers the waste to the shuttle. Since there are sensors onboard, the ai uses the sensor data and automatically distributes the debris across six dumpsters that get equally filled up. It’s almost fully autonomous, while the whole procedure can be done by the Interceptor itself, taking out the trash has to be done by humans.
Although all the electronics on the Interceptor, including the conveyor belt, shuttle, lights, sensors, data transmission, are solar-powered, the machine itself is powered by fossil fuel.
Conclusion
The point is everyone involved knows that the Interceptor is not intended to be the permanent fix. There will come a day that we can just get rid of the interceptors and there’s no plastic coming down the rivers but until that day comes we need to stop it from going into the ocean in the end. Moreover, 80% of the plastic flowing to the ocean from rivers comes from just 1% of the rivers. You have to cut the source of trash in order to make an impact. So the Interceptor aims at the 1% of rivers that contribute 80% of the trash flowing into the ocean from rivers.
Sources:
https://theoceancleanup.com/rivers/
I really love how the YouTube community got together to help in solving important issues. Many people, especially older people think they are useless but the fact that they are willing to do something that is not even connected to their actual responsibilities is great. They literally got the whole world together. (I believe they had donations coming from 191 countries) to raise $30 M in just 2 months.
I really like that idea. Right now big companies don’t really care about the environment, and even though they aren’t the biggest cause, they have the power to help. It’s so nice to see community come together to do something good and, as I have heard, few CEOs also contributed significant amount.
WOW! That’s a very interesting and promising solution indeed. I really appreciate the idea of cleaning up the rivers that are the most contaminated. Since the world is struggling with the problem of too much rubbish, I think that it would be a solution and would affect its reduction to some extent. I also really like the idea of YouTube content, because it can make young people aware of the scale of the problem and convince them to produce less waste. It is amazing how many people get involved in projects for solving important issues .Thanks for the article!
Let’s go to the moon!
this kind of projects genuinely make me so happy because it shows how being an influencer can be used to make positive changes. i also like how the project doesn’t try to present itself as the greatest change in itself but raises awareness of the problem and shows the importance of everyone contributing to making the differences