A DAY WITH
ALEX SCHULZE
He started with a bracelet and a boat. Now he's pulled 50 million pounds of plastic from the ocean.
Boca Raton, Florida · 4ocean HQ
There are people who see a problem and write a letter about it. There are people who see a problem and start a petition. And then there are people who see a problem — a beach in Bali buried under plastic, a fishing community drowning in its own waste — and decide to fix it. Alex Schulze is the third kind of person.
In 2017, Alex Schulze and his co-founder Andrew Cooper were surfing in Bali when they encountered something that stopped them cold. The beach wasn't sand. It was plastic. Bags, bottles, straws, fishing line — a tide of discarded material that had drifted in from the ocean and settled into the shoreline like sediment. They had seen pollution before. Everyone had. But this was different in scale and in proximity. You couldn't look away from it.
Most people would have taken a photograph, posted it, and flown home. Alex hired a local boat captain and started pulling plastic out of the water. Then he came up with a funding model that was, in retrospect, almost embarrassingly simple: sell a bracelet made from recovered ocean plastic, and use every dollar to fund more cleanups. One bracelet, one pound of trash removed. The math was clean. The mission was clear. 4ocean was born.
Eight years later, 4ocean has removed more than 50 million pounds of trash from the world's oceans and coastlines. They operate cleanup crews across 30 countries. They have a 135-foot Ocean Plastic Recovery Vessel working the open water. They have employed thousands of people in coastal communities who now earn a living pulling plastic out of the sea rather than watching it accumulate. The bracelet still sells. The mission has not changed.
The Founder
"We didn't start a charity. We started a business. The difference matters — because businesses scale."
Alex Schulze grew up in Boca Raton, Florida, surfing and fishing the Atlantic coast. He studied business at Florida Atlantic University, which is perhaps why, when he decided to take on the ocean plastic crisis, he approached it like a founder rather than an activist. The product had to work. The model had to be sustainable. The mission had to be fundable without grants or donations.
It took about two years for the bracelet model to prove itself. By 2019, 4ocean had removed one million pounds of trash. By 2022, ten million. By 2025, fifty million. Each milestone was accompanied not by a press release but by a new vessel, a new country, a new crew.
The Operation
4ocean's cleanup infrastructure is more sophisticated than most people realise. The flagship vessel — a 135-foot Ocean Plastic Recovery Vessel — works offshore, targeting the floating debris fields that form in ocean gyres. Smaller outrigger boats work the coastlines and river mouths, which are the primary entry points for land-based plastic entering the ocean. Beach cleanup crews operate on the ground in partnership with local communities, many of whom have been trained and employed by 4ocean as full-time cleanup captains.
The plastic that comes out of the water doesn't disappear. 4ocean has developed partnerships with recyclers and manufacturers to turn recovered ocean plastic into new products — including the bracelets themselves, which are made from the material pulled from the sea. The supply chain is closed. Nothing is wasted.
What makes 4ocean unusual in the impact space is the transparency of its accounting. Every pound of trash removed is documented, weighed, and reported. The running total — now past 50 million pounds — is updated in real time on their website. You can see exactly what your bracelet funded. That accountability is not accidental. It is the product.
The 4ocean Ocean Plastic Recovery Vessel — 135 feet of purpose-built cleanup infrastructure.
— Advertisement —
The Partner Model
4ocean's partner programme is where the business model gets interesting for brands. Companies — from browser developers to beverage companies — can partner with 4ocean to fund cleanup operations and carry the 4ocean mark as a signal of environmental commitment. The partnership is not a donation. It is a transaction: you pay for a specific, measurable amount of plastic to be removed from the ocean, and you receive documentation of exactly what was pulled out and where.
For a bar or restaurant that cares about its environmental footprint — and increasingly, their guests do — this is a compelling proposition. You are not buying a carbon credit. You are funding a crew in Bali or the Philippines or Haiti to spend a day pulling plastic out of the water. The impact is specific, visible, and verifiable.
Alex talks about this with the directness of someone who has had the conversation many times. "The brands that work with us aren't doing it for the press release," he told me. "They're doing it because their customers are asking them to. And they want to be able to say: here is exactly what we did, here is exactly what it cost, here is exactly what came out of the water."
FROM THE FIELD
World Oceans Day beach cleanup
Bali coastline cleanup operations
25 million pound milestone
Record-setting collection run
The signature bracelet — ocean plastic recovered
Alex Schulze at a 4ocean event
— Advertisement —
The Scorecard
Just Gerald — Best Days Ever Rating
The Verdict
I have met a lot of entrepreneurs. Most of them are selling something. Alex Schulze is also selling something — bracelets, partnerships, the idea that a business can be built around a problem that most people have given up on. But the difference is that he has the receipts. Fifty million pounds of receipts, to be precise.
What strikes you, spending time in the 4ocean orbit, is how much the model has been stress-tested. This is not a startup running on optimism and venture capital. This is a company that has figured out how to fund ocean cleanup at scale using consumer products, and has been doing it for eight years without losing the thread of the original mission. The bracelet still costs the same. The pound-per-bracelet commitment still holds. The crew in Bali is still working.
If you run a bar, a restaurant, or any business that serves drinks — and you care about what ends up in the ocean — Alex Schulze is worth a conversation. Not because he needs your money. Because he has built something that works, and he is looking for partners who want to be part of it. That is a rare thing.
Best Day Ever. Alex, you built something that matters.
Share This
Spread the word