Slat proposed the cleanup project and supporting system in 2012. In October, he outlined the project in a
TED-talk. The initial design consisted of long, floating barriers fixed to the seabed, attached to a central platform shaped like a
manta ray for stability. The barriers would direct the floating plastic to the central platform, which would remove the plastic from the water. Slat did not specify the dimensions of this system in the talk.
2014–2017: Initial prototypes In 2014, the design replaced the central platform with a tower detached from the floating barriers. This platform would collect the plastic using a
conveyor belt. The floating barrier was proposed to be long. They conducted and published a feasibility study. In 2015, this design won the London
Design Museum Design of the Year, Later that year,
scale model tests were conducted in wave pools at Deltares and
MARIN, testing the dynamics and load of the barrier in ocean conditions, and gathering data for computational modeling. A segment went through a test in the
North Sea in the summer of 2016. The test indicated that conventional
oil containment booms would not stand up over time, and they changed the floater material to a hard-walled
HDPE pipe. In May 2017, significant changes to the conceptual design were made: • Seabed anchors were replaced with
sea anchors, to drift with the currents, allowing the plastic to "catch up" with the cleanup system, and letting the system drift to locations with the highest concentration of debris. The lines to the anchor would keep the system in a U-shape. • An automatic system for collecting plastic was replaced with a system for concentrating the plastic before removal by support vessels.
System 001 {{external media Tests in 2018 led to sea anchors being removed, and the opening of the U turned to face the direction of travel, by creating more drag in the middle with a deeper underwater screen. On 9 September 2018,
System 001 (nicknamed
Wilson in reference to the floating volleyball in the 2000 film
Cast Away) It consisted of a long barrier with a wide skirt hanging beneath it. It was made from
HDPE, and consists of 50x12 m sections joined. It was unmanned and incorporated solar-powered monitoring and navigation systems, including GPS, cameras, lanterns and
AIS. The barrier and the screen were produced by an
Austrian supplier. In October 2018 it was towed to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for real-world duty.
System 001 encountered difficulties retaining the plastic collected. The system collected debris, but soon lost it because the barrier did not retain a consistent speed through the water. In December, mechanical stress caused an 18-meter section to detach, and the rig was moved to Hawaii for inspection and repair. During the two months of operation, it had captured 2 metric tons of plastic. In June 2019, after four months of root cause analyses and redesign,
System 001/B was deployed, with a water-borne parachute to slow the system, and an extended cork line to hold the screen in place. This successfully captured smaller plastic, However, System 001/B still did not adequately capture and retain debris.
Interceptors 001-010 In October 2019, The Ocean Cleanup unveiled a barrier for river cleanup, The
Interceptor, to intercept river plastic and prevent it from reaching the ocean. Two systems were deployed in
Jakarta (Indonesia) and
Klang (Malaysia). In January 2020, flooding broke the barrier of Interceptor 001 in Jakarta. It was replaced with a newer model with a stronger screen, simpler design, and an adjustable better-defined weak link. A third Interceptor was deployed in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic. In December, The Ocean Cleanup announced they would start large-scale production of the Interceptor series. In July 2022, an Interceptor Original was deployed near the mouth of
Ballona Creek in southwestern
Los Angeles County, California. This was the first Interceptor Original installed in the United States, and the second of its kind to be deployed globally. In May 2022, the Ocean Cleanup trialed a new Interceptor called Trashfence on the
Rio Las Vacas, a tributary of the
Rio Motagua, in Guatemala. It was anchored to the riverbed, and the anchors washed out. In April 2023, they returned with a pair of new Interceptors, at a point on the river with slower current, anchored to the riverbank. This was successful, and soon became their most prolific site; in its first year it removed 10,000,000 kg of trash from the river.
System 002 and 03 In July 2021, a new design called System 002, also known as "Jenny", was deployed in the
Great Pacific Garbage Patch for testing. System 002 was actively towed by two ships as opposed to System 001 which passively drifted. In October, the organization announced that the system had gathered of trash. In October, the project announced plans for System 03, which would span up to .By December, the project announced it had removed more than 150 tonnes of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and announced it would transition to the new longer System 03 the following year. In May 2023, the project deployed its System 03 barrier, 2,250 meters long. The system included a retention zone where material is held before it is removed from the water, with the nets' mesh size there being increased from 10 to 15 mm. This is to allow marine life such as fish and turtles to escape, and to allow smaller creatures such as
blue buttons and
violet snails to pass through. System 03 has about 5x the capacity of System 002, which is why they dropped a 0 from the naming scheme: ''[O]ur modeling suggests it may be possible to clean the entire GPGP with as few as 10 systems. That's why we knocked off one of the zeroes from '002' when we named '03' – we no longer need a three-figure amount of systems to clean all five ocean garbage patches around the world.''In June 2024, the project claimed that it had removed 15 million kilograms (33 million lb) of marine trash from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and from key polluting rivers around the world since 2019.
River system In 2021, Interceptor systems were enhanced to be able to tackle a wider range of rivers. The Interceptor Barricade was deployed in 2023, the first high-throughput river. Following strong rainfall in April 2024, the Interceptor Barricade successfully captured 1,400,000 kg of waste in a matter of hours. ==Design==