In 2021, YouTubers MrBeast and Mark Rober set out to remove 30 million pounds of waterway rubbish; the campaign later removed 34 million pounds

In October 2021, two of YouTube’s most prominent content creators set an uncommonly specific target to be achieved in a digital fundraising campaign: collect 30 million pounds of waste products from the Earth’s oceans, rivers and beaches, one pound for every dollar collected. Nearly three years after its launch, the fundraising phase of their campaign, known as #TeamSeas, concluded when Ocean Conservancy announced in July 2024 that the initiative had removed 34,080,191 pounds of trash from waters in 73 countries around the world.The campaign followed a tree-planting fundraiser that had already proven the model#TeamSeas is the follow-up project of Team Trees, which is the tree plantation initiative started by Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, along with Mark Rober, a former NASA engineer turned science YouTuber, in October 2019. The previous effort set out to raise $20 million to plant 20 million trees and met its tree‑planting goal, with the campaign now showing “25M+ trees funded and counting” and “800K+ donors worldwide”. Two years later, the duo used the same approach, but instead of trees and forests, they targeted plastic waste in the oceans. This time the organizations involved were Ocean Conservancy and The Ocean Cleanup.Every dollar pledged was tied to a pound of trashThe idea was straightforward and deliberately so: donate one dollar and one pound of trash would be removed as part of #TeamSeas. There was an established public goal for the campaign, which required reaching $30 million by January 1, 2022; the challenge was easily surpassed, with the whole $30 million raised in only 65 days by contributions from more than 400,000 people. Donations kept coming in after that milestone, and by the time the campaign wrapped in July 2024, the total had climbed to roughly $34 million, matching the one-pound-per-dollar pledge behind the final 34,080,191-pound tally.More than 8,000 creators helped push the campaign past a billion viewsWhat made # TeamSeas stand out was that it featured a huge number of content creators. According to YouTube's own announcement of the campaign, more than 8,000 creators from 145 countries pledged their support, with popular figures like Marques Brownlee, LinusTechTips, and Dhar Mann, among others, taking part. In total, video posts with the hashtag generated over 1.3 billion views. The money collected via #TeamSeas was split evenly between Ocean Conservancy and The Ocean Cleanup. Both organizations took a specific approach to addressing the problem that was present: Ocean Conservancy worked with beaches and the ocean, including removing ghost fishing gear, while The Ocean Cleanup focused on intercepting trash in rivers before it could reach the sea. Ocean Conservancy, which has run its International Coastal Cleanup every year since 1986, used its coordinator network and its Global Ghost Gear Initiative to carry out 1,962 coastal, underwater, and abandoned fishing gear cleanup projects with over 172,000 volunteers across 73 countries, from Haines, Alaska to Aldabra Atoll, Seychelles.The final total landed four million pounds past the original goalThe total weight of 34,080,191 pounds was confirmed in Ocean Conservancy's July 2024 announcement marking the campaign's conclusion, more than 4 million pounds past the original 30-million-pound goal. "It's awesome that the YouTube community came together to make it happen," #TeamSeas co-founder MrBeast said in the announcement.A 2020 paper in Science, “Evaluating scenarios toward zero plastic pollution”, by Lau and colleagues, modeled the flow of plastic waste into aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. The researchers found that roughly 11 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean every year, a figure they projected would nearly triple to about 29 million metric tons by 2040 without major changes to how plastic is produced and managed. Cleanups such as #TeamSeas do not tackle the flow directly, although they help eliminate any materials that have already entered the cycle before they get broken down further. The decomposition process is important; nevertheless, a January 2024 study led by Madeleine Milne of the University of Toronto and Dr. Britta Baechler of Ocean Conservancy, published in Environmental Pollution, found microplastic particles in 88 percent of protein food samples tested, including fish, beef, chicken, and several plant-based meat alternatives. Using separate survey data, the same research team estimated that an average adult in the United States consumes about 11,500 microplastic particles per year from protein alone, with some estimates running as high as 3.8 million.Catch the latest World News and Live updates. Download the TOI app.