The faces cleaning up our oceans

We know the story: plastic waste is clogging our landfills, sullying our nature reserves and overwhelming the planet’s oceans. Discarded plastic is piling up in even the furthest-flung corners of the world, from the Himalayan mountains to the Maldives.

This waste has become so ubiquitous that it’s in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Scientists estimate we consume a credit card’s worth of microplastic each year, so it’s lurking in your digestive system too.

Twenty-two million kilograms of plastic streams into our oceans every day. Even as we brave the gargantuan job of collecting plastic litter from our sea and our beaches, more pours in. So how do we solve the issue of waste in our seas? This is the question that designers, social enterprises and entrepreneurs are now exploring.

Much more complex than scrounging for bottles off the beach, a new wave of start-ups is dreaming up ways to tackle the pollution problem while also disrupting the plastic