The Ocean Cleanup is an idea of the Dutchman Boyan Slat. His team has developed a plastic catcher, a 600-meter long C-shaped sweeper arm that floats across the Pacific Ocean and sweeps up plastic for scooping and disposal.
In 2018, the arm left for a trial run to the Pacific. After some adjustments, the arm really got to work last year. The first swept plastic was brought ashore in December 2019. The sunglasses were made from that waste.
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The work area of the sweeping arm is the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch. That’s a plastic soup that is located between Hawaii and California. The floating landfill consists of about 1,800 billion pieces of waste and is about three times the size of France in total. The waste is dangerous to animals in the ocean.
The Ocean Cleanup hopes to be able to sell more products made from littering plastic in the future.
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