One of the core Foundation programs is the global Clear Blue OCEANS (CBO) plastic waste reduction initiative,  designed to help increase awareness of our need to reduce the use of convenience-based plastic food and beverage packaging and other one-time use products.

As hard as it may be to believe, we use in excess of 210 billion plastic beverage containers a year worldwide, and many are for water in the 12 to 16 ounce (350ml/530ml) bottle sizes.

In North America alone, we use and discard over 2.5 million plastic beverage and water bottles every five minutes.  More than 3.1 billion plastic water bottles each month or over 38 billion bottles last year alone.  This madness must stop! 

From sea to shining sea, plastic water bottles, shopping bags, food containers and countless other plastic products are running into our oceans by way of streams, rivers and tributaries, clogging up our street drains causing flooding and piling up in landfills. 

This is one of the main reasons we developed the CBO Initiative and we will be launching our new web site at www.clearblueoceans.com soon so everyone our can participate and help us reverse the growing trend of plastic waste on land and in our oceans.

However, the plastic water bottles and over 400 billion other plastic products,  mainly one-time use food and beverage containers, are just the tip of the plastic waste iceberg.

Plastic Waste Is A Serious Global Problem!

We are told that recycling is the answer, but less than 10 percent of all plastic waste ever is. In fact, thousands of boat loads full of plastic waste are shipped to other countries annually for disposal, where it is dumped for years at a time and never recycled!

To reverse this trend we need to get serious and change the way we view the products that cause it. If we do not, our landfills, but worse, life in our oceans - the world's largest natural food resource - will most certainly die off within the next 50 years.

Just visit any local grocery or drug store today in North America and you will see that almost everything either comes in or is packaged with plastic of some sort. Every loaf of bread we eat comes in one or even two plastic bags, and countless other prepared foods come in plastic containers today.

Although many of us recycle as much as we can, we simply need to stop buying products that do not need to come in plastic containers, like salads, cookies to name a few. At the minimum, we need to start using less of these products and demand new alternative packaging.

Ocean plastic waste is a real problem that MUST be dealt with and has already created a floating plastic soup of toxic debris greater than the size of North America itself in the North Pacific Ocean. A plastic soup of products that are washing up on remote island beaches and our own coastlines worldwide, killing millions of fishes, marine life and birds each year.

The Foundation's Clear Blue OCEANS initiative is designed to become a collective effort that will mobilize global brands and people of all ages to spread awareness of the plastic waste issues. It's that simple!

The time for action is now, so help us promote our Clear Blue OCEANS initiative when we launch this fall.

Working together we can and will make a difference!