The Ocean Cleanup – River Interceptor

Ocean Cleanup – The Beginning

Before jumping into details about the River Interceptor let’s have a brief overview of the Organization itself. The Ocean Cleanup was founded by Dutch Inventor Boyan Slat in the year 2013 when he was 18 years old. It is a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing advanced systems to clean up the oceans of plastic. The headquarters of Ocean Cleanup is in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The first systems deployed by the Ocean Cleanup in the year 2018 consists of floating booms. These booms float along with Ocean currents and collect any plastic that comes their way.

The inception of the River Interceptor

The initial boom systems launched by the Ocean cleanup received a lot of criticism. The amount of plastic already floating in our oceans amount to millions of tons in weight. And cleaning these existing wastes will be illogical if new plastic waste keeps getting added to this existing pile. It would lead to a never-ending impossible task to clean the ocean. The Ocean Cleanup took this criticism seriously and started working off a technology that can collect plastic and other wastes before they can reach the ocean. They started a study in 2015  in which more than 40,000 rivers were analyzed regarding the types of wastes they were carrying. They were able to label the 1000 rivers that are carrying the most amount of wastes. These 1000 rivers are responsible for 80% of the total plastic wastes that rivers carry into the ocean. Using this data, the Ocean Cleanup came up with the concept of the Interceptor.

How does the Interceptor work?

The Interceptor is anchored to the river bed, so it is always stationary. It only covers a portion of the river diameter, so that the movement of river life or other boats is not hampered. The floating plastic and other waste materials collected enters through the mouth. From there they are picked up by a conveyor belt and loaded into large dumpsters. The whole process is automated and is controlled by a smart system. There are a couple of dumpsters present in an Interceptor. Once a dumpster is full, the system starts loading the other dumpster. And once all of them are full, the system signals the local operator. The Operator empties the collected garbage in a boat and the Interceptor starts to collection the process again. The Interceptor works on solar power and has lithium batteries onboard. So, it does not produce any fumes or any form of pollution. An Interceptor can collect 50,000 Kg of waste per day, and in extremely polluted rivers that stat can go up to 100,000 Kg per day.

Future of the Interceptor

The Ocean Cleanup has plans to deploy Interceptors to all the 1000 rivers that it has listed out by the year 2025. It is a huge challenge and required the support of the local governments, authorities, and funds it receives for its work. Even if they achieve half of their target, it would be a great achievement. It has already deployed two Interceptors in Jakarta (Indonesia) and Klang (Malaysia). Two more systems are to be deployed in Can Tho in the Mekong Delta (Vietnam) and Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic). I hope that other companies will follow their footsteps and work in their own way to a better pollution-free future.

Official Page of The Ocean Cleanup Foundation

Please check out the official page of The Ocean Cleanup: https://theoceancleanup.com/

The Ocean Clean up is a nonprofit organization. You can help the cause by donating to the foundation directly. You can also check out some of their cool merchandise and products that are for sale. These items are created from the recycled plastic collected from the Pacific Garbage patch. https://theoceancleanup.com/merchandise/