STEP 1

In August 2015, around 30 vessels crossed the Great Pacific Garbage patch in parallel, in what was the largest ocean research expedition in history. Sailing from Hawaii to Los Angeles, the expedition  covered 3,500,000 km2, and collected more plastic measurements in three weeks than have been collected in the past 40 years combined.

STEP 2

Through a series of up-scaling tests, The Ocean Cleanup is now preparing its cleanup technology for deployment in 3-4 years’ time. The focus for 2015/2016 is to design and deploy the world’s first operational pilot array in coastal waters.

The coastal array will be the first time an operational Ocean Cleanup system is to be deployed in the ocean. Spanning 2000 meters (and with a barrier length of over 2300m), it will become the longest floating structure ever deployed on the oceans, even though this will be just 2% of the full scale structure. Deployment is expected in Q2 2016. On May 20, The Ocean Cleanup and the city government of Tsushima (a Japanese island which lies between Japan and Korea) jointly agreed to conduct research to bring the world’s first ocean cleanup array to Tsushima Island.

STEP 3

Assuming success of the Coastal Pilot, the Ocean Cleanup intends to deploy a full-scale cleanup array in the great pacific garbage patch. It will be composed of a large V-shaped array to concentrate the plastic toward a central point and a central platform to extract concentrated plastic and store it for transport.

The Ocean Cleanup’s research into the feasibility of its concept indicates that a single 100 km cleanup array, deployed for 10 years, will passively remove 42% of the great pacific garbage patch. They conservatively estimate this to be 70,320,000 kg. This (conservative estimate) would imply a cleanup cost of € 4,53 per kilo.