I grew up on a small island on the West coast of Florida. My first job was working as a mate on a charter vessel. After years of hard work and devotion, I became a licensed Captain. Throughout the years, I became more and more connected to the water.

I often heard people discussing ocean pollution but it was always in short soundbites such as, “Did you know that there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050,” or, “I heard there’s a patch of garbage the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean.” It wasn’t until taking a surf trip to Bali with my good friend and 4ocean co-founder Andrew Cooper that I witnessed first-hand, just how bad the plastic pollution crisis really is.

The waste management infrastructure in the United States is pretty good compared to most, so plastic has been “out of sight, out of mind” for most people. In certain countries, the economics of a recycling infrastructure doesn’t make financial sense, so they are left to dispose of the plastic themselves. Unfortunately, that opens the door to things like burning the plastic in an open fire or tossing it into rivers where it is carried offshore. When we witnessed the massive amounts of plastic washing up on Kuta Beach in Bali, we realised how big of a problem this actually was. Not just in Bali, but around the world. This was the beginning of 4ocean. Today, we have collected millions of pounds of waste from the waters of Bali, Haiti, Florida and beyond, we’re just scratching the surface of this global crisis.

In 2019, Andrew and I were on a scouting trip to Central America when we realised that Guatemala should be our next cleanup operation expansion. Guatemala is a beautiful country that has incredible things to offer. Unfortunately, when you have a large population centre like Guatemala City stationed right off of a major waterway like the Rio Motagua, there tends to be waste management conflicts that arise.

Many people don’t realise that rivers are one of the top sources of ocean plastic pollution and carry extreme amounts of plastic into the ocean every year. A common misconception is that a majority of ocean plastic comes from cruise ships or boaters who are simply dumping their trash into the ocean. This is not the case. It is coming from land-based sources that ends up in rivers due to weather or purposeful dumping. It is believed that the Rio Motagua has contributed to a large amount of ocean plastic that has been carried into the Atlantic where it is either floating in the current, sinking to the ocean floor, or being pushed back up onto the coastlines.