Ocean Cleanup pulls first 100,000 kg of plastic from Pacific

The Ocean Cleanup project reached an important milestone last week. It officially removed over 100,000 kilograms of plastic waste from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, CEO and inventor Boyan Slat announced.

“I’m proud of The Ocean Cleanup team for crossing this milestone, which is all the more remarkable considering System 002 is still an experimental system. Now that our technology is validated, we are ready to move on to our new and expanded System 03, which is expected to capture plastic at a rate potentially 10 times higher than System 002 through a combination of increased size, improved efficiency, and increased uptime.”

Since its deployment in August last year, System 002 collected 101,353 kilograms of plastic from the Pacific, sweeping an ocean area over 3,000 square kilometers - about the size of Luxembourg.

Combined with the waste collected by the previous prototype systems, The Ocean Cleanup has now collected 108,526 kilograms of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. “More than the combined weight of two and a half Boeing 737-800s, or the dry weight of a space shuttle,” Slat said.