In 2017, a study claimed that just ten rivers across the world are responsible for 90 per cent of the pollution in the ocean: The Yangtze, Indus, Yellow, Hai He, Nile, Ganges, Pearl, Amur, Niger and Mekong rivers, in order of the most polluting to least.
Efforts to tackle plastic pollution that is already in the ocean—such as the Ocean Cleanup's floating containment booms that attempt to collect the country-sized islands of floating plastic pollution in the Pacific—fail to tackle the source of the problem: The rivers that carry plastic from the cities to the sea.
Critics of the Ocean Cleanup’s efforts, which include the 5 Gyres Institute, have long pointed out that collecting plastic at sea is missing the real source, which lies upstream in the rivers.
Now, Boyan Slat—the 25-year-old Dutch founder of the Ocean Cleanup—has unveiled his NGO's answer to the criticism levied against it: A solar-powered barge named ‘The Interceptor’ that promises to pick up and clean thousands of kilograms of plastic each day.
In operation, it resembles the plastic-collecting barges in operation in Baltimore today, but at a higher scale. The Interceptor is fully solar-powered, autonomous, and promises to collect 50,000 kilograms of plastic each day. It sends a text message to local authorities once its dumpsters are full, at which point it moors itself to the riverbanks so its load can be emptied.
Unveiled on October 26, The Interceptor, according to Slat, has been under development since 2015 and is part of a plan to clean up the 1,000 most-polluting rivers in the world (which the Ocean Cleanup says are responsible for 80 per cent of ocean plastic pollution, according to their own research).
Speaking to Reuters, Slat said, “To solve the plastic pollution problem we need to do two things: we need to clean up what’s already in the oceans, for that we of course have the Ocean Cleanup System," adding, “Now we also hope to tackle the other side of the equation: preventing more plastic from reaching the ocean in the first place.”
The device is currently being tested in Indonesia and Malaysia, with plans to tackle the 1,000 most-polluting rivers in the world by 2025.
The foundation’s efforts to clean the ocean have not been without hitches. System 001, the boom deployed to the Pacific, broke up due to the constant force of ocean currents. After being towed back for repairs and returned, it failed yet again. Each failure led to a different iteration of the design, however, and it was only by October that the team was able to successfully capture garbage (to the level of microplastics) from the Pacific.
Laurent Lebreton, one of Ocean Cleanup’s chief scientists, has published work showing how most of the plastic pollution found at sea comes from ships—fishing nets alone make up half of the great Pacific garbage patch (a gyre of low-density plastic the size of Russia.