This Robot Eats Trash #TeamSeas

i'm gonna attempt to collect 30 million pounds of trash from this river all by myself but there's a catch because mr beast and his boys and a butt ton of volunteers are gonna try and beat me to it by collecting 30 million pounds of trash from this beach now i know what you're thinking mark one versus a thousand hardly seems like a fair fight and you'd be right except for one minor detail i neglected to mention i actually do have one other teammate who just so happens to be a floating 50-ton trash-eating robot you gotta play to your strengths right [Music] all right dude you ready to start this competition dude we've been going look at all these people what go go go go you started already so with the trash picking competition officially underway while mr beast and his crew performed manual labor like a bunch of lame humans all the trash stuff is blowing on me all me and my autonomous robot had to do was wait and we didn't have to wait long [Music] i love the idea of jimmy getting all sweaty on the beach picking up trash the old fashioned way while i just let it all come to me we got some eggs looks like a go-gurt oh what do we got here that's a cola reel come on man this isn't even open so jamina's crew got off to an early lead and i can confidently say that's thanks to their premature start and not their trash collection techniques jimmy yeah the ocean's putting more trash on the beach but by this point my robot had also started firing on all cylinders and was closing the gap which makes this the perfect time to explain exactly how it works and to do that let's go back in time a few days to when i first showed up here hey what's up boyle welcome thank you welcome to the interceptor nice place you got here that is on slat he's the reason this robot exists and his origin story for caring about trash in the ocean comes from something that happened to him more than a decade ago i was 16 years old i went scuba diving in greece and i looked around me and i just saw more plastic bags than fish and i was just so disappointed by that that i thought why can't we just clean this up that kind of started a few things for me which is a humble way of saying it led him to founding a non-profit organization called the ocean cleanup with the audacious goal to rid the ocean of all trash and plastic so naturally that involves removing trash directly from the ocean itself but if you think about it that's only half the problem because to make a lasting impact you've also got to cut the pollution off at the source and turn the spigot off and as it turns out eighty percent of the plastic flowing to the ocean from rivers comes from just one percent of the rivers so their idea is to put these trash eating robots on those worst offending rivers and that will go a long way to fixing the problem at the source so that's the strategy behind these now to the juicy part to how these river interceptor robots actually work so step one is to anchor it near the bank of the river and then as trash floats down the river it runs into this barrier on the surface of the water which shepherds the trash towards the mouth of the thing and then once the trash is funneled in it travels up this conveyor belt after which it's dropped in one of these six floating dumpsters and the fact that they float is really clever because it means once they're full the interceptor can stay put while the dumpsters are flotilla down the river where whatever can be recycled is recycled and the rest is properly disposed of using the local waste management system on top of that it's got solar panels and a rainwater collection system so it's fully off the grid and thanks to some onboard ai technology the trash collection happens essentially autonomously and importantly it's boyon's non-profit that provides the interceptor but it's the local government and communities that implement operate and maintain it this one is in the dominican republic and it's run locally by their naval officers who are just incredibly lovely to work with by the way oh and as a final point that floating barrier sticks only one and a half feet deep into the water which means while the trash gets captured on the surface the fish can swim back and forth under it all day long or as boy on puts it it's very good at catching plastic it's terrible at catching fish unless you're a dead fish then it'll catch you if you're already dead and filled with gas you will be caught will be caught so by this point jimmy and the boys had an ever-growing pile of trash piles looking pretty nice if i was you i'd be getting a little nervous i'm a wee bit nervous but the good news was that thanks to the steady consistency of my robot i had now overtaken them as the leader in the amount of trash collected but even better was that while they continued to labor away in the hot sun i just left mine on autopilot and took the opportunity to go enjoy the natural beauty of the dominican beaches and make friends and hang out with some of the locals and even have this amazing disney princess of a moment and while i don't speak manatee i think she was coming to say thank you on behalf of all the ocean creatures for us doing our part to keep the trash out of their home and after that my curiosity got the best of me so i went to check out their progress first hand and after a brief display of dominance keep it up boys keep it up you want to come help us i'm picking up trash right now look at that a christian a couch cushion this is a live feed of what's going on right now there's a lot of couches in the ocean that's like eight of my shovels a second back to work i eventually helped them out because i'm such a nice guy even going as far as to offer to place their hard-earned trash definitely in their own pile for them so it counts towards their total and not mine so as the sun set over the city i made some new friends who after i introduced myself kept pronouncing my name as gringo for some reason and right there behind me you could see the robot was just powering on because that's what robots do collecting trash for me through the night so i continued to add to my totals even while i slept the next day started out nice but then rained hard for a few hours which increased the trash in the river quite a bit in fact they told me after heavy rain all six dumpsters can get filled in a single day which seemed just crazy to me so when i asked where all the trash was coming from we took a trip up the river and before long the source of the trash became pretty obvious anytime we saw a canal like this meant to carry rain water to the river and there were a lot of them it would be filled with trash that washes down from the communities near the river and even worse you could see sometimes how people would throw trash off the side of a cliff down to the river as an improvised trash dump and part of me felt really frustrated by this until we parked the boat and actually visited one of these communities and out of the gate i saw a soccer ball and tried to showcase some of my moves but after they put me in my place i knew my only recourse was to go full sami sosa on but as them walked around and talked with them it became apparent pretty quickly the trash ends up in the river because there are no other options you and i have the luxury of putting our trash in a bin and rolling it out to the curb and then it's magically empty by the end of the day in the developed cities in the dominican republic this is of course how it also works but in these remote poor communities there are a lot of challenges that prevent this such as just not being accessible by big trash trucks which means they just don't have somewhere to put their waste so whatever doesn't make it to the river just piles up in their own village and in talking with the leaders in these communities it's clear they're passionate about being part of the solution and the dominican government in conjunction with the un is proactively working together with their own people to come up with custom long-term solutions and be an example to the rest of the world the point is everyone involved here knows that interceptor is not intended to be the permanent fix ultimately we want to help ourselves out of business and the sooner the better there will come a day that we can just get rid of these interceptors and there's no more plastic coming coming down these rivers but until that day comes we need to stop it from going into the ocean in the end by the time i wrapped up my work at the interceptor we ended up making two trips with the dumpsters down the river so the waste could be properly disposed of even though i basically did no manual labor to make this happen there's still like a sense of pride here for some reason i don't know we did it so after getting the total weight recorded all that was left to do now was to meet back up with jimmy wow this is a certified butt ton right here how much did you get i got it right here how much did you get it's on my paper i'm not showing you spoiler alert it's much much less than 30 million pounds okay so before we show you our papers here and reveal who won man versus machine if you're watching this video we need your help to get this pile of trash to 30 million pounds and buckle up because the next two months are gonna be crazy now for context two years ago the internet demanded we start team trees and not only did we band together and reach our goal of planting 20 million trees by 2020 but people are still planting on average 2 600 trees per day on teamtrees.org so in order to actually get 30 million pounds of trash and plastic out of the freaking ocean we're following up team trees with team c's and we've spent the last eight months working with the perfect non-profit cleanup organizations for this goal and even though it was difficult they guaranteed us that for every single dollar we raise there will be one less pound of plastic and trash in the ocean and that's just bonkers that literally means that for every one dollar donated this much trash comes out of the ocean and for five dollars this much trash comes out of the ocean and we're gonna pull this off by not just tackling trash in the ocean but cutting off the trash sources at the rivers and beaches too so half the money we raise we'll go to boion's charity the ocean cleanup so they can just make a butt ton more of these trash-eating robots then they'll place them in that one percent of rivers that are the worst defenders by far and then the other half of the money will go to ocean conservancy and they'll focus on the beaches with tons of volunteer beach cleanups and then of course actually going out to sea and cleaning up a bunch of trash there as well and so we need your help because 30 million less pounds of trash in the ocean really means we're trying to raise 30 million dollars by the end of the year in just two months which is insanity and exactly why we banded together the entire youtube community heck all of social media to help us hit our goal by the end of the year go team seas let's do this we're saving the oceans in two ways i don't know if you realize we can do this i'm excited for team c's oceans good team c's good plastics bad i personally will be kicking things off by removing a hundred thousand pounds from the ocean by donating a hundred thousand dollars and youtube originals have stepped up and they'll be matching the first four hundred thousand dollars donated but that's still way way less than 30 million if you're a working adult consider how much trash you're willing to remove to send a message and if you're a kid talk to your parents about this get creative and do some chores to earn some money or maybe talk to your teacher and set up a class or even school fundraiser using the team feature on the website and then after that retweet anything to do with team sees like share watch a hundred times every team sees video support this campaign we need you you can start by sharing this video and then just harass all your favorite creators make sure they're on board team seas with all the division in the world this just feels like something we can all see eye to eye on like everyone agrees that trash and plastic don't belong in our beautiful oceans and of course we know team seas alone won't solve this issue but it sends a strong message that young people are hungry and willing to go beyond just retweets to raise awareness we can be a catalyst for positive change in this world i am just so stoked we totally got this [Music] how many pounds of trash is right here uh 500 000. you are a liar how many pounds of trash is really here 62 738 pounds of trash is right here wow oh 37 000. yo we beat him i will say my robot in the next two weeks and he'll do that so if you want to find more robots and more humans to solve this important problem click the blue button go to teamses.org donate right now go donate

Channel: Mark Rober

Views: 37,440,116

Keywords:

Id: pXDx6DjNLDU

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/LittleMizz]

An honorable and much needed venture. I wish everyone involved the best of luck, and I really do hope that this will reach its goals. Teamtrees was ambitious, this even more so. Donated 5 dollars, thank you for doing all the heavy lifting for people like me

[u/newfoundslander]

Mmm trash, yum yum trash, I love trash

[u/matolandio]

i fucking hate clickbait thumbnails with the burning passion of a thousand suns.

[u/_Comment_Connoisseur]

A lot of whining in here. I expect Boris Johnson and trickle down economics will have this thing sorted and we don't need these fine people to step up. /s

[u/fkjdnsoif]

Why does it feel like they're not effectively addressing the source issue?

This "solution" doesn't solve the root cause. Why does it feel like every single attempt at bettering the state of the planet isn't actually addressing the cause. Which is switching from using plastic, single use plastics (like the straw the presenter used to drink his coconut from), and having laws to prevent companies from continually making the problem worse.

Why does nobody address the source issue?

[u/Hothera]

The source of the trash isn't 1% of the rivers. It's from people who have no better place to throw their trash but the river. The unsexy, but effective solution to solving the trash problem in the ocean is to build more landfills in developing countries. The trash the robot collects goes into a landfill anyways. The video alludes to this a little bit, but even as a temporary solution it doesn't seem particularly effective. It would be cheaper and easier just to collect the trash directly from the dump sites.

[u/djwurm]

I just donated for this project by buying some shirts and a hoodie.

good cause and hope others donate as well.

[u/TheDamus647]

Donated $10 last night

[u/RAGEEEEE]

Scam...