The Ocean Cleanup aims to start extracting plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the first half of 2018. 

These miles-long booms are made of High-density polyethylene, ie “plastic”.

Really obvious questions:

• How long until wave action tears up these booms? 
• How much longer until the pieces of HDPE plastic wash ashore in Hawaii?
• And why doesn’t that tow boat have three white lights on a mast? 

Enquiring minds want to know!

News Release from TheOceanCleanup.com

On May 11th during The Next Phase event, we finally unveiled what we have been covertly working on for the past two years; an improvement to our design that will enable us to start extracting plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within the next 12 months. This design improvement also increases the efficiency of the system; we estimate to be able to remove half the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in just 5 years.

The design improvement entails making the cleanup system mobile. Rather than fixing a system to the seabed at great depths, we will use sea anchors to ensure our systems move slower than the plastic. The cleanup will be carried out by a fleet of systems, rather than one massive systems.

This new technology and the successful funding round announced, enable us to accelerate production, deployment and the extraction of plastic from the ocean. The first pilot parts are now in production and testing of the pilot will start off the American west coast by the end of 2017. With the first deployment in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in the first half of 2018, we will start cleaning up two years ahead of schedule. See our announcement in full below:

Find out more about our design improvement our technology page.

Founder is a college dropout (Bio, photo) 

And >>> Careers(!) 

Already 60+ people on Staff in Europe (as far away from the Pacific as possible)

LOL 2014: Gets Prize from United Nations

LOL 2015:  Best Inventions, Time Magazine  “62-mile-long (100 km) floating boom—at an estimated cost of $15 million”

LOL: Numerous Fluff-Pieces from ‘Fast Company’

May 3, 2017: THE OCEAN CLEANUP RAISES 21.7 MILLION USD IN DONATIONS TO START PACIFIC CLEANUP TRIALS

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2014: Ocean Patch Claims Are 99.5% Garbage

Fox: Dutch group says it will soon start cleaning up ocean trash