#great pacific garbage patch

[hope-for-the-planet]

The Ocean Cleanup removed a record 25 million kilos of plastic in 2025 (and they’re just getting started) | The Optimist Daily

With 25 million kilos of plastic removed in 2025 alone, The Ocean Cleanup is scaling up efforts to tackle plastic pollution from rivers to o

From the article:

In a world where the scale of plastic pollution can feel overwhelming, 2025 brought a milestone worth celebrating: The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch nonprofit dedicated to removing plastic from marine environments, pulled more than 25 million kilograms of waste from global waters last year alone. That’s over 55 million pounds or about 2,000 garbage trucks’ worth of plastic that is no longer drifting through our oceans. The achievement brings their cumulative haul to more than 45 million kilos (99 million pounds) since operations began.

In addition to removing huge amounts of plastic waste from the ocean, Ocean Cleanup is also now focusing on devices to collect plastic trash from rivers.

A recent analysis by Ocean Cleanup found that 80% of ocean plastic comes from just 1,000 (1%) of rivers. Stopping plastic at the source so it never even gets to the ocean is significantly easier and cheaper--especially when there are a relatively small number of rivers to focus on for the biggest impact.

Ocean Cleanup has an ambitious goal to remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040 through a combination of prevention and direct removal.

[reasonsforhope]

20,000 Pounds of Trash Removed From Pacific Garbage Patch: ‘Holy mother of god. It worked!’

The man who won't rest until the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is cleaned up has successfully tested his system for doing so.

““The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade inventing systems for waterborne litter collection.

Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success, leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could be removed by 2040.

Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating islands of plastic trash—five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter from thousands of miles away into a single radius.

The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and 27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there, launching from San Francisco since 2013.

GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device, but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002, nicknamed “Jenny,” successfully netted 9,000 kilograms, or around 20,000 pounds in its first trial.

It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1 millimeter in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine life...

Slat estimates ten Jennies could clean half the garbage patch in five years, and if 10 Jennies were deployed to the five major ocean gyres, then 90% of all floating plastic could be removed by 2040.” -via Good News Network, 10/19/21

[wachinyeya]

Scientists Find Plastic-Eating Fungus Feasting on Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Marine scientists discovered an ocean-borne fungus chomping through plastic trash in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

[thepastisalreadywritten]

•

[bumblebeeappletree]

50 million kg of plastic removed from our oceans — but what actually happens to it? This video picks up where the last one left off, diving into the full lifecycle of ocean plastic after it's hauled onto the deck of System 03, The Ocean Cleanup's newest and most powerful barrier system. From sunglasses and Kia trunk liners to Coldplay vinyl pressed from river plastic, discover how recovered debris is being transformed into real products — and why much of it still can't be recycled at all. Then we go deeper: how AI-optimized routing boosted collection efficiency by over 60%, why the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is growing faster than it can be cleaned, and what the new 30 Cities program — backed by a record $121 million donation — means for the fight upstream. With plastic-eating bacteria emerging in oceans worldwide and System 03 shrinking the cleanup from hundreds of barriers to just 10, the tools are finally starting to match the ambition. Whether they'll be enough is the question the next decade will answer.

// Timestamps

0:00 - 50 Million kg

2:00 - Products

3:18 - River Plastic

4:54 - Is Any of This Making a Difference?

7:14 - AI and AWS

7:49 - Neuston

9:36 - 30 Cities Program

12:15 - Microplastic

14:44 - Why They Think They Can Win

// References

https://docs.google.co...

[blatentmisinformation]

Due to the large accumulations in the ocean, there has been observations of entire ecosystems of plastivores, organisms that subsist entirely on plastic and occasional aluminum, in the Pacific.

[monsters-conquer-the-world]

[catchymemes]