First Plastic on Shore - Press Announcement | Cleaning Oceans | The Ocean Cleanup

Welcome everyone here on this beautiful sunny day in Vancouver, British Columbia. So we are here today to commemorate the end of the first mission of the Ocean Cleanup in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as well as looking ahead on what's coming up for the cleanup as well as for the first plastic that we have collected. At the Ocean Cleanup our mission is to rid the world's oceans of plastic and to do that we really need to do two things. We need to prevent more plastic from reaching the oceans but we also need to clean up what's already in the oceans. And of course we're working on the prevention sides. We've developed these interceptors that we just launched a month ago to catch plastic in rivers before it reaches the oceans but that's not enough to rid the world's oceans of plastic. To succeed in that you also need to deal with the legacy pollution which is already in the oceans today and by far the largest accumulation of trash in the world's oceans. It's the Great Pacific Garbage Patch which is out there between here and Hawaii. It's twice the size of Texas, contains 100 million kilos of plastic and not only does it not go away by itself it gets more harmful over time because it breaks down into these smaller and smaller microplastics which can then end up in in the food chain. So we have to clean this up but you might wonder well it's 20 years ago that this patch was discovered why hasn't anyone cleaned this yet? Well it turns out that it's actually pretty difficult to do it. First of all it's obviously very far away. This area is huge and it's one of the 14 meters in height. Wind, currents, it's all such a hugely destructive environment so doing anything out there it's just really difficult. But after years of research and development in September of last year we felt ready to to try and launch our first cleanup system towards the Great Pacific Garbage Patch which we launched from San Francisco that year. Now this was a critical milestone yet it wasn't a celebration because we knew that it was still very much an experimental system. There was no guarantee that it would actually work. I think I gave it like a 30 or 40 percent chance of actually working first time around and indeed our our expectations were proven right. We had our ups and downs, we had problems, we had structural failures but eventually the team was able to take those lessons into account and actually get to a point that we had a system that was successfully catching plastic two months ago. So that was really quite an amazing moment especially after all these things that we went through and of course around me we see the sort of the culmination of those efforts and definitely it's seeing this makes me incredibly proud of what the team has done over the past years and so a huge thanks to everyone who has been involved and for getting us to this point that we actually have the first plastic back on land which just fills me with a lot of pride and joy. But then of course we succeeded in catching plastic but we're not ready yet to clean up the whole garbage patch. So as you know the objective is to clean up 50 percent of the garbage patch in five years and for that we want to build a whole fleet of systems that are bigger, more efficient and before we can actually deploy that fleet we have this essential stepping stone to still fulfill which we call system number two which is going to be the first full-scale fully operational cleanup system and we're actually starting with the development of that right now. So as mentioned we now have a system that's catching plastic but there's still a few things that we really need to do where there's really still innovation required before we can actually clean the ocean which includes long-term durability and long-term retention. So being able to retain the plastic for for very long periods of time those are the two main engineering challenges that we'll be working on for the coming year as we prepare for the launch of system number two. But then it's important to realize that for this cleanup to be successful it's not just a technical challenge there's also this other side of the equation which is the financial challenge because you know you might have a technology that works well but if there's no one to to pay for it it's still not going to happen. So now ideally you have some kind of model through which once those systems are out there the cleanup can continue to pay for itself. I mean that would just be perfect full circle. Now as you know we're also doing this work on on the rivers and there the situation is it's very different because the river is actually owned by someone it's the national territories there's somebody who has an incentive to keep that river clean. So there's actually this business case to do this but for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that's not the case and you know that's why critics have always pointed out that even if you have a technology to do it it's not going to happen because it's international waters so it's no one's problem but we disagree because we believe that this is everyone's problem so everyone could be part of the solution as well. So over the past few years we've came we've come up with a plan through which we believe we can actually do this and to explain our plan I'll explain it by by answering the two most commonly asked questions that that we receive. The first question is well what are you going to do with the plastic? Now of course the it's important to stress that the objective of this first campaign wasn't to maximize our harvest it was really just to get to a point that we have a system that's catching plastic really validating the fundamental principles behind the concept yet by doing that we inevitably also collected some plastic partly by the system partly by the crew next to it on on the boat that was monitoring the cleanup system and so we have 60 big bags of one cubic meter around me here with filled with with catch and if you look inside of them you see it's absolute garbage I mean this this stuff has been in the ocean for for likely for decades it's it's corroded it's degraded it has salt on it there's algae on it it's it's really complete garbage yet we believe that these bags hold the key to making the cleanup self-sustaining because this is not just any plastic this is plastic from the great pacific garbage pit the infamous great pacific garbage patch and it's it's like the difference between a normal rock and a rock from the moon it's it has it's plastic that has a has a story attached to it and not just that it has a purpose behind it because now that it's out there or out of the ocean it it won't continue to kill sea life for for another decades or centuries right so what we're going to do is we're going to recycle this plastic and we're going to turn it into beautiful sustainable products completely made from this plastic from the great pacific garbage patch and 100 of the proceeds going to the continuation of the cleanup of the great pacific garbage patch now we're and these are not going to be gimmicks you know these are going to be products that you actually want and we're going to try this out with the first plastic that we have here not right now in in in the coming year to see whether this is actually something that can work because you know this is something that that has never been done before this will be the first products ever made from plastic from the great pacific garbage patch so success is not guaranteed this with the with this quality of material it's surely going to be a challenge yet because of the research that we've been doing over the past few years we believe that this should actually be possible now you might say well wait a minute aren't there already a lot of products made from ocean plastic well for that it's important to realize that that that these that right now there's no real standard no hard definition of what ocean plastic means so it's really kind of this murky definition which could mean 100 plastic from the ocean or one percent plastic from the ocean and even it's even possible that none of the plastic at all came out of the ocean it's it's quite quite crazy and what we believe is that it's that it's important to to bring transparency to the market so we've been collaborating with the world's leading certification body DNVGL to set up a public standard which would be able to certify plastic that is actually coming out of the ocean and they'll be sharing a bit more information on that in a bit so what they've done they've been following every step of this plastic from the moment it was collected from the ocean and will continue to do so when the plastic is being sorted when it's being recycled all the way to the plastic being this beautiful sustainable product which brings us to the second most frequently asked question that we received well what are uh how how can i how can i help how can we be part of of this this cleanup now the the fact of course is that the great pacific garbage fetch is really far away so you just you can't just go out there and collect some plastic yourself so through this plastic through these products we hope to give everyone the opportunity to be part of the cleanup now the aim is to to launch the first product in in september of next year but we already want to give our our supporters the opportunity to to join the journey of this plastic today so if you go to our website theoceancleanup.com by you can actually sign up for 50 bucks and what you'll be able to do is you can follow the journey of the plastic as well as be the first in line for when that that that product is actually being launched so and of course because we're a non-profit 100 of the proceeds would already go to the mission and with this we hope to give everyone the opportunity to join us in turning this problem into a solution now so once again thanks thanks for everyone who has been been part of the journey so far it's been a crazy six years and i'm so happy that we finally have this first plastic back on shore so so thanks everyone who got us to this point and i hope you'll be joining us in in being part of the next chapter of the ocean cleanup as well so thank you