Impact at Scale chatted with Tom Peacock-Nazil, the Founder and CEO of Seven Clean Seas. Seven Clean Seas is an organization that has commercialized ocean plastic cleanup. What started as a passion project for Tom and his wife has now turned into a full-fledged business, employing people to help with waste management.
 
Plastic is a major problem in our world and Tom and his team want to do everything they can to help stop as much of it as possible from getting into the oceans. Tom tells us about how they lucked into their business model and how that eventually led to him doing work for the World Cup that took place in Qatar. Tom also talks to us about how cleaning up the waste is not good enough and how they are working with communities to help educate them on how to manage plastic and their waste in general.
 
Some of the topics Tom covered:
  • Turning a passion into a business
  • How a condom company changed everything
  • Working with the World Cup
  • Impacting local communities
  • What happens to the plastic once it is collected
  • The importance of waste management
  • Setting audacious goals
Some other titles we considered:
  1. You Are Not Going To Fix This Problem With Philanthropy
  2. Creating a Product With Permanence
  3. People Do Not Understand the Damage to Their Health That Plastic Can Cause
  4. People Don’t Even Have Bins
  5. There Is No Magic Bullet for This, We Can’t Clean Our Way Out
  6. Start Slow and Take Little Steps

Read the best-effort transcript below (This technology is still not as good as they say it is…):