- It's twice the size of Texas,
three times the size of France,
and contains around 250 million pounds of trash.
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So there are five areas in the world
where plastic concentrates,
and by far the largest one
is the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
And it doesn't go away by itself.
Even if we were to stop putting
any new plastic in,
this Garbage Patch
will still be there.
10 years from now,
it will still be there.
50 years from now.
And will probably even still be there
100 years from now.
So that's why we have to clean it up.
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The main difference between System 002
and the previous systems
is that it's active.
So, we're using propulsion
to tow it forward
at a very low speed,
slow enough, so that fish
can just swim in and out of it.
But fast enough
so that we can actually capture
a much larger area of plastic field.
So in the past 12 weeks,
we've run an extensive test campaign
on System 002 on Jenny
to try and prove that it works.
With this test campaign,
we collected 64,000 pounds of trash,
which to us has proven
that we can actually scale this
to a fleet that can clean
the entire Garbage Patch.
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Ultimately we want to do something
useful with the trash we take out,
and what we think will be very poetic
is if we can fund the cleanup
through the proceeds
that we get from recycling,
the plastic we take out,
it would just be this self-sustaining cleanup,
which I think would be really cool.
So to prove that we can actually
make something valuable out
of this material, we thought,
let's make designer sunglasses out of this.
This is not garbage.
This is actually beautiful material
where you can do a lot of
sustainable, durable things with.
So going forward,
the idea is that we partner
with consumer brands
and integrate our material into
their durable, sustainable products.
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To really solve the plastic pollution issue,
you need to do two things, right?
You need to clean up the plastic
that's already in the ocean,
but at the same time,
we need to rapidly cut the source.
We need to rapidly prevent more plastic
from going into the ocean.
And what we believe
is the fastest way to do that
is to intercept it in the world's
most polluting rivers.
So if we place systems there
and catch it before it reaches the oceans,
we believe we can rapidly reduce
the amount of plastic going to the ocean.
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So based on the the test results we've gotten,
we now see that it would
just take 10 systems
to clean up 50% of the Garbage Patch
in five years' time.
And of course, the more systems you deploy,
the faster you can clean up
because, ultimately, we want to clean up
90% of this Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
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So really, the sole reason
why we founded the ocean cleanup
is to protect the natural environment.
It's only natural for us
to design our operations in a way
that they're safe for the oceans.
And so, of course,
we we've studied this extensively.
We have Marine biologists
on boards with our cleanup
and, you know, initial results
look very promising,
We see hardly any bycatch
in our cleanup operations.
But, of course, we continue to take
a careful step-by-step approach
and studying it along the way.
Ultimately, what we hope
to achieve with the ocean cleanup
is a solution approach
where by cleaning up
what's in the ocean by intercepting it
before it reaches the oceans,
we can rapidly reduce
the amount of plastic in the ocean.
Hopefully, with the next 10, 20 years,
we can help ourselves out of business.
And hopefully by scaling up our solutions now,
we can rapidly get to 25 million pounds
and then 250 million pounds.
It's all hands on deck now for us
to scale up the solutions
now that we know they work.