A sustainable, serverless website
for a great cause

The Ocean Cleanup is a non-profit organisation - based in the Netherlands. Their mission is big and ambitious, but necessary and very worthwhile: to develop advanced and innovative technologies to get rid of plastic in the world oceans and rivers. In 2016 The Ocean Cleanup website was launched. A collaboration between Dutch creative digital agency GRRR and The Ocean Cleanup. A collaboration that is still going strong. Together they work on all forms of communication and digital products like infographics, web pages, interactive tools, design, UX, UI, as well as signage, communication and support during events.

Their biggest objective: to keep the different target audiences informed and involved. About any progress and updates regarding the process of The Ocean Cleanup globally. To ensure continued support, enabling The Ocean Cleanup to keep going with the great work that they are doing.

Purpose of the website

The website fulfils a crucial role in keeping different audiences involved:

• Enabling people to support The Ocean Cleanup by making a donation, becoming a partner or purchasing official merchandise
• Recruiting talen to join a team of out-of-the-box thinking employees
• Spreading The Ocean Cleanup's mission worldwide

GRRR’s focus is to make this complex material easy to understand, captivating and easily accessible: through infographics and maps like Trask Tracker, Plastic Journey, Citizen Science, as well as a clean and simple explanation of the River and Ocean systems

Digital technology

The Ocean Cleanup website is a high traffic website. Therefore, GRRR wanted to make a sustainable choice for the architecture of this site. It had to be fast, but also reliable, able to handle large spikes in traffic.

The Ocean Cleanup website is not built on a traditional web server. It functions on a serverless web architecture by using several micro web services. This set up allows for more efficient energy usage, and, therefore, limits the CO2 emissions of the website.

Also, all pages of the website are generated statically. This means that the website can handle peaks of high traffic at any time. Other advantages are that it makes the website faster, cheaper and safer.

As the team of The Ocean Cleanup is a tech-savvy bunch - who don’t shy away from administering rich content - a nice, clean CMS with rich content editing options is required to enable them to create their content. GRRR implemented a design system that is easy to upscale - preventing any content migration in the future.

Want to geek out and read even more about this? Have a look here: https://grrr.tech/posts/2019/case-study-serverless-architecture-for-the-ocean-cleanup/

The Ocean Cleanup think and act big. Expecting the same from us. Sharing all types of data for us to visualise. Great to be able to contribute to their greater good.

Results

Fundraising: the website is the most important tool to attract funding. The Ocean Cleanup has raised more than €35m. Helping them grow their team of engineers and researchers to further evolve their technology

Talent acquisition: helping to attract scarce technical talent. The Ocean Cleanup team has grown to 120 technical engineers

Information source: offering detailed and easy to understand up-to-date information suitable for each target audience - from fans and media to scientists and financiers

Live 24/7 - especially at time critical moments like the launch of The Interceptor in 2019 when the site became a real-time data dashboard. Able to handle peaks of traffic due to worldwide media attention, but still ensuring a low CO2 emission