Good news! The Ocean Cleanup has officially removed over 100,000 kg of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Using 45 extraction and spread out over and area comparable to Rhode Island, System 002 or “Jenny” has collected 101,353kg of plastic since it’s deployment in August 2021. That’s a lot of plastic – so much in fact that the entire garbage patch is estimated to be 100,000,000, so this total haul is 1/1000th of the total. That is pretty impressive for a project that has operated for less than a year.

Now that their technology has been validated, they plan to implement System 03, shown in the video above, and capable of collecting plastic at 10x the rate of System 002. The original prototype system was able to capture 7,173 kg of plastic, System 002 was able to corral 101,353 kg, and hopefully System 03 will far surpass that number as well. As the team build out more prototypes and refines their methods, expect the country sized patch of garbage in the Pacific to start to look less formidable.

Source: The Ocean Cleanup