The Ocean Cleanup Aims to Rid Our Oceans of Plastic Pollution

It's twice the size of Texas, three times the size of France and contains around 250 million pounds of trash. There are five areas in the world where plastic concentrates and by far the largest one is the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch and it doesn't go away by itself. Even if we were to stop putting any new plastic in, this garbage patch will still be there 10 years from now, it will still be there 50 years from now and will probably even still be there 100 years from now. So that's why we have to clean it up. The main difference between System 2 and the previous systems is that it's active. So we're using propulsion to tow it forward at a very low speed, slow enough so that fish can just swim in and out of it but fast enough so that we can actually capture a much larger area of plastic field. So in the past 12 weeks we've run an extensive test campaign on System 2, on Jenny, to try and prove that it works. With this test campaign we collected 64,000 pounds of trash which to us has proven that we can actually scale this to a fleet that can clean the entire garbage patch. Ultimately we want to do something useful with the trash we take out and what we think would be very poetic is if we can fund the cleanup through the proceeds that we get from recycling the plastic we take out. It would just be this self-sustaining cleanup which I think would be really cool. So to prove that we can actually make something valuable out of this material we thought let's make designer sunglasses out of this. This is not garbage, this is actually beautiful material you can do a lot of sustainable durable things with. So going forward the idea is that we partner with consumer brands and integrate our material into their durable sustainable products. To really solve the plastic pollution issue you need to do two things right you need to clean up the plastic that's already in the ocean but at the same time we need to rapidly cut the source we need to rapidly prevent more plastic from going into the ocean and what we believe is the fastest way to do that is to intercept it in the world's most polluting rivers. So if we place systems there and catch it before it reaches the oceans we believe we can rapidly reduce the amount of plastic going to the ocean. So based on the test results we've gotten we now see that it would just take 10 systems to clean up 50 percent of the garbage patch in five years time and of course the more systems you deploy the faster you can clean up because ultimately we want to clean up 90 percent of this great pacific garbage patch. So really the sole reason why we founded the ocean cleanup is to protect the natural environment it's only natural for us to design our operations in a way that they're safe for the oceans and so of course we've studied this extensively we have marine biologists on board with our cleanup and you know initial results look very promising we see hardly any bycatch in our cleanup operations but of course we continue to take a careful step-by-step approach and studying it along the way. Ultimately what we hope to achieve with the ocean cleanup is a solution approach where by cleaning up what's in the ocean by intercepting it before it reaches the oceans we can rapidly reduce the amount of plastic in the ocean. Hopefully with the next 10-20 years we can help ourselves out of business and hopefully by scaling up our solutions now we can rapidly get to 25 million pounds and then 250 million pounds. It's all hands on deck now for us to to scale up the solutions now that we know they work.