Creator-Lead Movement Raises $1 Million In 1 Hour; Aims To Remove 30 Million Pounds Of Trash From Rivers, Oceans, And Beaches

#TeamSeas campaign was launched with the goal to raise 30M dollars to remove 30M pounds of trash. The Ocean Cleanup and Ocean Conservancy were chosen as the non-profit partners for cleaning up trash in rivers, oceans, and beaches.

The Last Successful Campaign – TeamTrees

The campaign is initiated by MrBeast and Mark Rober, two content creators on YouTube. It is a follow-up to their widely successful TeamTrees campaign, launched in 2019 that raised over 20M dollars to plant 20M trees.

Raising The Level This Time With #TeamSeas

This time for Team Seas the key statement is: “Every $1 is one less pound of trash in the ocean“.

THE BIG IDEA

Lost, abandoned and discarded fishing gear – or ghost gear – is some of the deadliest ocean trash, and super tricky to recover. Luckily the experts with Ocean Conservancy’s Global Ghost Gear Initiative® have been removing ghost gear from waters all around the world for years.

MAPPING

Ocean Conservancy will work with its Global Ghost Gear Initiative® members and partners on the water to identify ghost gear graveyards around the world.

REMOVAL

Specially trained experts will grapple or float the gear to the surface, where the gear will be hooked onto boat cranes and lifted out of the ocean. (Yes, it’s a very cool process.)

RECYCLING [IF APPLICABLE]

TeamSeas will work with local authorities to make sure any labeled, working gear is returned to local fishers. Remaining gear will be recycled– when possible – and the remainder properly disposed of.

The raised funds will be split 50/50 between the two organizations – The Ocean Cleanup and Ocean Conservancy, and they will use them for Interceptor deployments and operations.

Donation History

Creators taking the campaign to a global stage through social media really brings the largest group of eyes to the topic. This resulted in huge donations from Billionaires like Jack Dorsey (CEO of Twitter), Elon Musk (CEO Tesla, SpaceX) in their last campaign (TeamTrees), raising $23 Million which was $3 million over their required target.

At the time of writing this article, the initiative #TeamSeas has already raised more than $10 million dollars in almost 3 days. The fundraiser started off with a bang as the first videos went live on YouTube by some of the biggest creators on the platform.

As soon as their videos started amassing attention, the donation count on their website (teamseas.org) started racing too.

So far, it has seen some notable donations from Tobi Lütke (CEO of Shopify), YouTube and even the Cruising Giant – Royal Caribbean.

To get a better idea of this global movement/fundraiser, watch the video below that nicely tries to gamify the solution of the global problem of marine pollution.

Reference: The Ocean Cleanup | Video Credits: Mark Rober – YouTube

The Marine Learners does not own the rights of the video.