On May 19th, from our assembly yard in Alameda, a 120-meter section of our cleanup system was towed out of San Francisco Bay and into the Pacific to conduct a tow test. We are happy to report that the entire section performed satisfactorily. Of the minor issues that the screen did endure, most were identified during earlier...
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Today, we entered into an agreement with the Netherlands relating to the deployment of our cleanup systems on the high seas. The agreement deals with matters such as safety of navigation, protection of the marine environment, and the rights of other users of the high seas with respect to our cleanup systems. With this agreement the...
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We have successfully initiated our 120-meter tow test unit towards its designated test pattern approximately 50 nautical miles outside of San Francisco’s Golden Gate. This is an important test before we deploy our complete system into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch later this summer. In our last update, we detailed the...
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To meet our ambitious goals of deploying the first ocean cleanup system this summer, we are reminded of one of our basic design principles here at The Ocean Cleanup: doing is the fastest way of learning. In less than five weeks, we progressed from signing the lease for an empty assembly yard in Alameda, California to a fully active...
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Before we share some great news on the System 001 assembly front, we wanted to provide you with an update on our recent scale model tests, the most advanced we have conducted so far. Why test You might be wondering why we are still testing and simultaneously building our system. This comes down to our iterative design process....
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After three years of research including two field expeditions, extensive laboratory experiments and data analyses, we are thrilled to finally release the results of our study on the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch or GPGP. Our peer-reviewed manuscript published today in the journal Scientific Reports summarizes the methodology that...
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A new ocean cleanup prototype is being deployed on the North Sea today. It is one of the last steps as we prepare to launch the first cleanup system in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch this summer. To understand how we arrived at this point, here is a brief history of the North Sea prototypes, and the reasons why we're deploying another...
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The Ocean Cleanup and the City of Alameda announced today that they have signed a lease agreement for portions of the former Alameda Naval Air Station, a peninsula now known as Alameda Point. Located on San Francisco Bay, this is the site where assembly of the first cleanup system will begin within the next month. The combination of...
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Our research team has just published a new article in the journal Environmental Science and Technology revealing that plastics within the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are loaded with pollutants at levels that may be high enough to harm organisms ingesting them. This is particularly concerning when considering the high plastic exposure we...
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After almost 3 years of work, The Ocean Cleanup research team has recently submitted its comprehensive results about plastic pollution in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. More than 1.2 million pieces of plastic have been collected, counted, sorted, characterised and categorised. Terabytes of aerial images and data have been...
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