River Plastic

November 16, 2019 / activist360 / Leave a comment

Through years of research into riverine plastic and its behaviors, The Ocean Cleanup has sought to understand the fundamental principles of plastic transport from rivers to oceans.

Offshore Talk: Catching Plastic, One Way or Another

September 24, 2019 / activist360 / Leave a comment

As Ocean Cleanup was about to install System 001/B in the speed up configuration for the first time on July 8th this year, mechanical Engineer Fedde Poppenk sat on deck of the Maersk Transporter and took a few minutes to share some early positive observations about the slow-down configuration. Turns out, his intuition was confirmed a few weeks later as we picked slow-down as the winning concept.

Solving the Mystery of Missing Ocean Plastic

September 20, 2019 / activist360 / Leave a comment

Lead Researcher and Oceanographer, Laurent Lebreton, discusses the mystery of missing ocean plastic and our new explanation for its whereabouts.

There is a vast difference between the several hundreds of thousands of tons of floating plastic in the ocean and the millions of tons entering annually. By creating models for the path of ocean plastic, it was observed that most river emissions are likely being filtered by coastlines and beaches, with a small fraction going offshore. This small fraction turns out to be relatively old and likely not degrading very quickly – thus, showing persistence. This new understanding highlights the importance of both source reduction and cleanup of legacy ocean plastic.