Ocean Cleanup System 03 Is Catching Plastic Pollution in the Pacific
Boyan Slat, founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup, explains the nonprofit's mission to clean up floating plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
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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 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 operating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, located hundreds of miles offshore between California and Hawaii. We spoke with Slat, who gave us an update on the mission and an overview of how the System 03 picks 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," Slat told me.
"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," Slat said. "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 Ocean Cleanup's fourth-gen system, preceded by System 001, System 001/B and System 002. System 03 is the organization's largest and most effective ocean-cleaning device. The organization said Monday in a post on X that it has now collected over 10 million kilograms (22 million pounds) of trash from oceans and rivers. You can follow the progress with Ocean Cleanup's 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 long-term 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," Slat 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 Ocean Cleanup System 03 in action in CNET's latest video about the mission to rid the world's oceans of plastic pollution. Happy Earth Day!