As demand for more sustainable and environmentally friendly products goes mainstream, a large number of organizations and innovations are sprouting up to combat pollution. One of these nonprofit organizations is The Ocean Cleanup, which has been developing a number of technologies to stop the flow of plastic pollution into our oceans.
Since 2013, the Netherlands based team of engineers and scientists, led by inventor, founder and CEO Boyan Slat, have been testing and deploying debris-catching barriers, autonomous River Interceptors and — probably its most famous plastic-catching device — the Ocean Cleanup System.
The Ocean Cleanup’s System 03 is the latest iteration of its oceangoing plastic-catching technology. It’s currently operating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located hundreds of miles offshore between California and Hawaii. We spoke with The Ocean Cleanup’s Boyan Slat, who gave us an update on the mission and an overview of how the new clean-up System 03 works to pick up floating plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean.
“Our cleanup system is comprised of two parts. On one end you have the hardware, the actual physical system that is out in the ocean. And then secondly, you have the software, which are the computer models that guide us to where and how we tow the system through the patch,” Boyan told CNET’s Senior Video Producer Stephen Beacham.
“On the hardware side we have this two-and-a-half kilometer, U-shaped barrier that is towed by two ships, which funnels the plastic from the ocean’s surface into a collection bag called the retention zone,” Boyan continued. “The plastic gets retained and then periodically, once that’s full, we take that retention zone on the deck of one of the ships and empty it, and then return it to sea so we can keep collecting while we do the sorting on the ship.”
System 03 is The Ocean Cleanup’s fourth-gen cleanup system, preceded by System 001, System 001/B and System 002. System 03 is the organization’s largest and most effective ocean-cleaning device. To date, The Ocean Cleanup has extracted 353,520 kilograms of plastic waste from the Pacific Ocean, according to the ocean system dashboard on the organization’s website.
The Ocean Cleanup plans to scale up its cleaning operation after testing of System 03 concludes. It hopes to deploy as many as 10 ocean cleanup systems at a time, its end goal being to rid the Pacific Ocean of most or all of the floating plastic pollution over a 10-year span.
“Since we started with System 002 in 2021, we’ve seen a steady increase. The first expedition we did we caught, I think, about 7 tons of plastic,” Boyan said. “In late 2023 … we went up to 45 tons in a single trip. This year we hope to do even better than that. The magical number that we’re aiming for is 100 kilos per hour. If we hit that with a decently sized fleet of cleanup systems, we can actually clean up the patch within 10 years.”
Watch the full interview with Boyan Slat and see The Ocean Cleanup System 03 in action in CNET’s latest video about the mission to rid the world’s oceans of plastic pollution.