So how do you...
You're just like "Hey Siri, start the Interceptor"
Or how does this work?
Oh yeah, it's a smart Interceptor.
So if we do this (clap).
There we go.
Wow.
We are on Interceptor 004 in the Dominican Republic
and we’ll soon be recording a video with Mark Rober
for the #TeamSeas campaign.
The setup here is, it's me versus MrBeast,
see who can pick up more trash.
I've kind of got you and the Dominican Republic Navy,
in my corner with the robots,
and they're pursuing the old school approach, picking it up from the beaches.
So this is you working very hard to clean the ocean?
This is me working very hard baby.
Just while I was saying this sentence
I picked up like 30 pounds of trash.
I'm a mechanical engineer myself
and I can appreciate a well intentioned design.
It's all about robots.
Oh, here goes the GoPro.
So back in 2019,
MrBeast hit 20 million YouTube followers,
and he then, together with some other YouTubers,
decided to organize this fundraising campaign to raise
$20 million to plant 20 million trees.
It was called TeamTrees
and it was this massive online hit
and it had a good impact.
So then about a year ago, Jimmy, MrBeast, tweeted
that he wants to clean the ocean
and that he wants to do a new campaign
called TeamSeas.
So we replied to that and we also recorded a video
with the suggestion to work together.
Dear MrBeast, one year ago, you put out the wish to rid
the world's oceans of plastic,
and we then got overloaded with a tsunami of messages
from people telling us that we should talk.
So here we are.
But before we talk about
how we want to clean the ocean,
let's first dive into the problem.
Basically, there's two parts to it.
On one hand, you have the buildup of decades of pollution
already in the ocean, of which the largest collection
is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch near Hawaii.
But the even bigger issue is that thousands of
tons of new plastic still flow into the ocean
Our scientists have been studying rivers around the world
and found that just
So by cleaning the patches
and stopping new plastic in rivers,
we can basically clean our seas.
And now here we are one year later.
What is this, a hat?
It's kind of fascinating to see.
A couple of diapers, a bunch of plastic bottles.
It's immensely fascinating to just see.
Here comes the tire.
So we're here on one of the banks of the Rio Ozama.
The river is just out of sight, maybe 100-200 meters that way.
And here you can really see
where the plastic pollution problem begins.
It's in poor communities where there's
no waste infrastructure, there's no garbage truck
coming here every Tuesday to collect the waste.
And obviously, when the rains come, it enters drains
and from drains, it ends up in the ocean.
When you see the difficulties and the hardships
some of these people are facing,
you see what the river looks like,
but it's by no fault of their own that
plastic is going into the river.
They don't have a better option.
You know, if I can take that sense of responsibility
and help facilitate tools, that they can feel empowered
to help themselves and their own communities.
The Interceptor really, it does have value in keeping plastic
from going to the ocean, but the real value
is that it's like a catalyst in these communities.
People kind of, something shifts in their brains and they realize,
we can be part of the solution.
And it's the communities themselves, helping themselves.
You know, if TeamSeas is instrumental in
getting more solutions like Interceptors
in communities like this,
that's a huge win.
So
for the TeamSeas campaign,
they will be attempting to
And half of that will be going to us, The Ocean Cleanup,
to catch it in rivers with our Interceptors.
And the other half will be going to the Ocean Conservancy
who will be manually collecting the trash
from beaches around the world.
So I think it's a
really cool partnership,
and I think it will have a big impact on the amount
of plastic in the oceans.
The fact that the dumpsters float and
can easily just be extracted from the Interceptor
to take to an offload site is very clever design.
You can see just a simple fishing boat
has enough power to take it down river.
This is the most exciting thing in the world, to me.
This is only one of our dumpsters,
and this is the light one, by the way,
so it'll be real interesting.
I'm going to take this and go visit Jimmy
and see what they came up with, and see who won.
But I'm feeling pretty confident, I'll say that much.
It's just wild to see this, that in a couple of days,
all of this trash was going out to the ocean.
But now it's not.
We've caught it. We intercepted it.
And then we're going to take it and properly dispose of it
instead of putting it out in the ocean with all the fish.
So, it's pretty cool to see.
I feel like, even though I basically did no manual labor
to make this happen, there's still a sense of pride
here for some reason.
We did it.
Yeah good luck, Jimmy.
Everyone wins, but especially me.