Let's Clean Up the Oceans
- Viroqua Plastic Free
- 5 minutes ago
- 3 min read
It all began when a young man scuba diving in Greece was shocked to see more plastic bags than fish in the water. He turned his concern into a high school science project and when he was 18, Boyan Slat of The Netherlands founded The Ocean Cleanup. He crowd-funded $2 million in support of the project.
His first target was the Great Pacific Garbage Patch discovered by Captain Charles Moore in 1997. Due to wind-driven surface currents, it is an area twice the size of Texas that accumulates plastic waste floating on or just below the surface of the water. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest of five such areas, called gyres, in the world’s oceans. The other four are found in the South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. Although the name suggests a concentrated area of plastic debris, it is more like a plastic soup strewn over many miles.
Slat recognized that ocean debris naturally accumulates along coast lines. His challenge was to create an artificial coast line that would concentrate the ocean plastic so it could be removed. It took several attempts before he and his team figured out how to make a system work. System 001 (2018) broke apart and moved at the same speed as the plastic. But System 001-B (2019) successfully captured and collected plastic debris. Two ships and a floating boom with a permeable skirt were able to collect and remove two shipping containers of plastic waste and return it to port to be disposed of responsibly.
System 002 (2021) was the first full scale cleanup system. Up to 2021, The Ocean Cleanup had collected 7,000 kg (15,400 pounds) of plastic waste. System 002 collected that amount in a day and a half and during its use extracted 282,787 kg (623,438 pounds) of trash.
The current System 003 is three times longer than previous versions, can clean up an area the size of a football field every five seconds, and is anticipated to be the blueprint for creating a fleet of ocean cleanup systems. Their target is to remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040.
Slat and his team realized that preventing plastic from flowing into the ocean in the first place also needed to be tackled. Their next prototype was a solar-powered river interceptor which corrals plastic before it enters the ocean. They learned that one thousand rivers in the world account for 80% of the plastic trash reaching the ocean. Because each river is unique, there are several models in the Interceptor Solutions family. They are designed to meet the needs of large and small rivers, deep and shallow rivers, wide and narrow rivers, slow-moving and fast-moving rivers, and those rivers affected by the ocean’s tide.
The Ocean Cleanup teams work with local governments to obtain necessary permits and with community members and organizations to recruit a network of partners to assist with the various aspects of the project including the manual cleanup of the “legacy plastic waste” that is found on area coast lines.
In 2025, the group celebrated their best year to date and removed more than 25 million kg (over 55 million pounds) of waste from the ocean and rivers. They credit their success to “years of research, data-driven decision-making, and commitment to implementing responsible solutions adapted to local contexts.”
In 2026, The Ocean Cleanup is undertaking its most ambitious project to date – the 30 Cities Program. The group has analyzed which cities are responsible for one-third of the global plastic waste that enters the ocean and plans to systematically deploy Interceptors over the next five years at each of these cities’ rivers to prevent the plastic from entering the ocean.
Slat is optimistic and says, “I think that in the not-too-distant future, we can have cleaned the ocean. And we’ll look back at today in disgust, thinking about how could we have allowed all that plastic to simply flow into the ocean uninterrupted for so long? Why didn’t we do this earlier? I think we’re truly just a matter of years from achieving that.”
Videos of The Ocean Cleanup projects will be featured on the
Viroqua Plastic Free Facebook page/group in April to celebrate Earth Day!
Sources:
Nature on PBS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iwnC5x7-aA