The Ocean Cleanup and Coldplay Announce LP Made Using Plastic Intercepted in Guatemala

World-leading band Coldplay joined the largest cleanup in history in 2021 – and have now announced their first collaborative product: a limited ‘Notebook Edition’ of Coldplay’s latest LP, manufactured using recycled river plastic intercepted by The Ocean Cleanup.

The Ocean Cleanup and Coldplay have announced the release of their first co-created product: the limited Notebook Edition LP of the band’s new album ‘Moon Music’ manufactured using plastic intercepted by The Ocean Cleanup from the Rio Las Vacas, Guatemala, in 2023. The album is available to pre-order now with delivery expected in October 2024.

COLDPLAY X THE OCEAN CLEANUP: MAKING MUSIC TOGETHER

At The Ocean Cleanup, our mission is to rid the oceans of plastic. To achieve this, we employ a dual strategy of cleaning up legacy pollution in the oceans, while also intercepting plastic in the world’s most polluting rivers to stop the inflow of trash to the seas. But the work doesn’t end there. What can we do with the millions of kilograms of plastic we’re now catching? How can we ensure that this garbage never again returns to the marine environment?

To solve this problem, we look for partners who can give our plastic a new life – and now with Coldplay, alongside crucial recycling, processing and manufacturing partners Compuestos y Derivados S.A., Morssinkhof and Sonopress, we’ve found a new and innovative solution: turning our intercepted plastic into useful material, and then turning that material into music.

Coldplay partnered with The Ocean Cleanup in 2021 and the band supports our mission in various ways: providing funding for our operations removing plastic from oceans and rivers, sponsoring Interceptor 005 in Malaysia (and the planned Interceptor 020 in Indonesia) and sharing our mission by showing footage of our cleaning operations at their live shows.

However, a unique mission requires unique partnerships – and Coldplay were keen to find new ways to use the plastic we have intercepted. Once the band contacted Boyan Slat, Founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, to ask about turning our plastic into an LP, we got to work.

FROM MATERIAL TO MUSIC

Turning plastic garbage into a functioning and high-quality record is not an easy process. First, you can’t use just any plastic trash: these records must be made specifically from PET. This meant we can’t use the ocean plastic we extract from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (which is mostly HDPE, LDPE and PP) – we’d have to look to our network of river Interceptors to find the right stuff.

But that’s not all: to ensure the required sound quality for Coldplay’s music, the plastic must be as clean and free of imperfections as possible. There was only one Interceptor which could provide the required large quantity of sufficient-quality PET: Interceptor 006 in Guatemala, which has been preventing tsunamis of trash flooding into the Caribbean Sea since deployment in summer 2023.

Once the plastic was intercepted in the Rio Las Vacas, our partner Biosfera GT set up a separate sorting process to set aside the best-quality PET. This was then passed to Compuestos y Derivados for processing into flakes: the start of the process of converting this plastic from waste into valuable and usable material.

The plastic flakes were then shipped to the Netherlands, where Morssinkhof continued processing the material to create granulate – the key ingredient for an LP. Once processed, the material was passed to manufacturer Sonopress to put the pieces together and make the record.

THE SOUND OF SILENCE

The challenges didn’t end there. A quality-sounding LP cannot be created using only our river plastic: it must be blended with other recycled plastic to deliver the high standards we seek in order to ensure our plastic never returns to the marine environment.

The toughest challenge was finding the right blend between our river plastic and the smaller proportion of other recycled plastic. The key question was: what is the maximum percentage of river plastic we can use in the LP while still ensuring perfect sound quality?

After long periods of testing and collaboration, our partners identified the sweet spot: each limited edition LP will consist of 70% PET river plastic, all removed from the Rio Las Vacas and passed through a traceable and sustainable supply chain. This is currently the maximum percentage we can use while maintaining quality. The smaller proportion of the plastic in these LPs is recycled waste plastic PET bottles from other sources.

When we were able to play our newly-produced ‘blank’ LP (before any music has been cut) and hear perfect silence – we knew we had found the right blend, and that our material was ready to bring Coldplay’s new album to life.

A MISSION WITHOUT LIMITS

We’ve shown we can remove large quantities of plastic – but completing our mission requires more. We have to work with others to create value from this plastic trash and ensure it is managed and processed responsibly, never again returning to the water.

Innovative and progressive partners of all kinds – such as Coldplay – are essential to our mission. We have now caught millions of kilograms of plastic, and we require supportive partners who can make use of the unique qualities of our material and work with us to find innovative solutions to plastic pollution.

The Notebook Edition of Moon Music is the first time we have used our plastic to create a new product alongside our partners – but this is only the start. We are working hard with Coldplay and all our partners to find new ways to give our catch a new life and make sure the plastic we remove never returns to the ocean.

Keep an eye on theoceancleanup.com and follow us @theoceancleanup to learn more about how we worked with Coldplay to bring this idea to reality, and our plans for future partner products later in 2024.