The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) is not a solid plastic island in the middle of the sea. Yes, it is located in the north of the Pacific Ocean, between Hawaii and California, and yes, it is the point of greatest accumulation of plastic waste on the planet, but it does not cover a fixed and determined territory with precise coordinates on the map. It is just an area in which some 100,000 tonnes of plastic are floating, scattered on the surface of the water, which have arrived there carried by sea currents and the manifest incapacity of human beings to take care of the waste they generate. It is the largest landfill in the world, an ethereal and scattered landfill. This is why cleaning it is so difficult.
The team from The Ocean Cleanup, a foundation dedicated to collecting floating plastic for over ten years, went there at Christmas 2018. The organization was born in 2013, so five years later, after much trial and error in controlled environments, they already had a prototype of a floating barrier that was supposed to clean, with virtually no human intervention, plastic from this area of the ocean. Boyan Slat, 31, from Delft, Netherlands, is the founder and CEO of the organization. He and the rest of the team sailed there with the aim of testing the system.
“We were very excited,” says Matthias Egger, a scientist with the organization who was part of the original team. “Until we started it. First it didn’t work, then it broke down,” he says in a video call with this newspaper. “It was difficult,” he says, not only because the invention they had spent years developing could not withstand the slightest shock from the sea, but also because it had to be definitive proof that they were on the right track. “I remember thinking, ‘We promised the world a solution, but we haven’t got it, we’ve failed,'” Egger says. The defeat seemed complete, until Slat addressed the group.
“It’s normal,” Slat then said, trying to encourage his employees, “I would have been surprised if it had worked the first time.” After a few words of encouragement, they moved on to analysis: what went wrong and how to learn from the mistake they had just made. Slat was 24 at the time.
“We learned so much from that mistake…” Egger recalls, “when you’re in the world of innovation and developing cutting-edge technologies, you eventually learn that there are ups and downs, and Boyan does very well in that area.” Two months later, they had successfully redesigned the model and were back in the ocean to test it. “Boyan is always focused on his mission and never gives up,” he adds.
Goodbye to plastic
The Ocean Cleanup aims to eliminate 90% of plastic floating in the oceans by 2040. Since its launch, it has made significant progress: by 2024, it has removed more than 11.5 million kilos of waste from rivers and oceans. This is more than they had collected in previous years, but they are still very far from their goal. To achieve this as quickly as possible, they are attacking the problem on two fronts: the ocean and the rivers. Each already has its corresponding system tested and working.
The organization cleans the oceans with the System 03a floating barrier approximately 2.2 kilometers long which deploys and hooks at two ends two boats which navigate in the great Pacific waste zone. It works by taking advantage of ocean currents: it concentrates floating plastics in a central point where they are collected and transported to land to be classified and recycled.
The Interceptor, which operates in rivers, is a quasi-autonomous vessel designed to collect waste before it reaches the sea. Previously, they ran on solar power and a system of floating barriers that conveyed the waste on a conveyor belt, but over time they have become simpler. It is now a manual system in which a crane operated by a local worker removes the plastics accumulated on the barrier.
The system is already working in rivers in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Guatemala and Thailand. Between 1.15 and 2.41 million tonnes of plastic reach the ocean via rivers each year. The crucial finding that led them to tackle this problem is that only about 1,000, or less than 1% of the world’s total, are responsible for about 80% of this pollution. Normally, they pass through highly populated urban areas where there is no waste management and where when it rains, plastic waste from streets and landfills is washed into riverbeds and, ultimately, the sea.
In 2025, The Ocean Cleanup launched the 30 Rivers Programan initiative that aims to intercept plastic in the world’s 30 most polluted rivers before it reaches the sea. The organization estimates that these chains — including the Pasig, in the Philippines; Ciliwung, Indonesia; or the Klang, in Malaysia, are responsible for a substantial part of the global flow of waste dumped into the oceans.
Their plan is to deploy Interceptor systems in major river cities and create alliances with local governments to improve waste management. If it works, the strategy could reduce plastic pollution flowing from rivers and reaching the sea by up to a third by 2030, a decisive step towards achieving its ultimate goal of eliminating 90% of the planet’s floating plastic.
cruising speed
“We are in a very exciting phase because we know what needs to be done,” Slat says during a video call. They have the data and the necessary technology, they know how and where to implement it. “Now it’s just about moving at full speed.” Slat is a sober man, withdrawn into himself, focused on the other side of the screen, who sometimes seems to be elsewhere. Your organization installs one Interceptor per quarter and to meet your goal, you need to increase this installation rate to one per week. “And then two,” he says, as if it were impossible for it not to happen, even if everything seems to contribute to the goal being unattainable “in a few years.”
The attitude is standard. Like a muscle, you have spent years training your capacity for perseverance, facing impossible problems, insurmountable challenges and great challenges. “Any sane person would have given up at least three times,” he says. “The first eight years, for example, were very hard. We had a motivated team and a lot of pressure, and nothing we did worked,” he recalls.
Hank van Dalen, the organization’s oceans director, still remembers those days. “For him, failures are unforeseen learnings. He did not allow himself to regret the mistakes made, he began directly to analyze the problem to find a solution,” he also says via video call.
Slat compares the difficulty of innovating to being in a mountain range full of mountains. The entrepreneur must find the tallest one, but thick fog prevents him from just taking a look and climbing the one that seems tallest. You have to try, climb a mountain range only to realize that it’s not the highest, come back down and try again under the pressure of the team, financial partners and the rest of the world, who trust you to find the solution.
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