Giant Trash Collector Launched to Scoop Up Ocean Waste

The 600-meter-long structure will tackle the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—a huge buildup of trash floating between California and Hawaii—but not everyone thinks it will work.

Written byCatherine Offord

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ABOVE: The system is being towed from San Francisco out into the Pacific to scoop up trash.
THE OCEAN CLEANUP

A Dutch nonprofit organization has launched an enormous trash-collecting device into the Pacific Ocean. Following its departure from San Francisco on Saturday (September 8), the 600-meter-long, U-shaped structure is currently on its way to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch—the name given to a huge, swirling accumulation of trash between Hawaii and California—where it will begin scooping up some of the patch’s 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic.

“The plastic is really persistent and it doesn’t go away by itself and the time to act is now,” Boyan Slat, founder and CEO of Rotterdam-based The Ocean Cleanup, tells the Associated Press.

System 001, or “Wilson” as it’s known to members of the project, consists of a boom that floats on the surface of the water with a three-meter-deep screen to trap plastic and ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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