Boyan Slat

He was born on July 27, 1994, in Delft, the Netherlands.⁠[1]

An NBCNBCNBC (National Broadcasting Company) is an American national commercial broadcast television network. It was founded by RCA in 1926, began as a radio network and later developed television. With ABC and CBS it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks; it passed to General Electric with RCA in 1986, merged with Universal to form NBCUniversal in 2004, has been controlled by Comcast since 2011, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry News article of 2018 states that his father was a Croatian artist and that his mother, who raised him, worked as a Dutch-British consultant for foreigners relocating to the Netherlands. A Bloomberg Businessweek article of 2018 describes him as of Croatian descent.⁠[2][3]

The NBC News article states that he began tinkering at the age of 2, building treehouses and ziplines and experimenting with explosives. The timeline that The Ocean Cleanup publishes for him gives 1997 as the year he built his first “invention,” a chair.⁠[2][1]

The timeline published by The Ocean Cleanup states that in 2004 he nearly burned down the house in a chemistry experiment gone wrong. The NBC News article states that in his early teens he tried to remove moisture from ammonium nitrate on the family stove, which set off an explosion and filled the house with a caustic fog.⁠[1][2]

The timeline published by The Ocean Cleanup states that in 2009 he set a Guinness World Record for “launching most water rockets simultaneously,” with 213 rockets. The NBC News article states that at 14 he organized 250 people to launch water rockets from a soccer field, earning the Guinness World Records entry; an Outside magazine article of 2017 gives his age at the time of the record as 12.⁠[1][2][4]

A VRT NWS article of 2018 states that in the summer of 2011, aged 16 and on holiday with his parents, he went diving in the Mediterranean and saw more plastic than fish; the NBC News article names the place as the Greek island of Lefkas. In The Ocean Cleanup’s release of June 3, 2014, he recalled: “I first became aware of the plastic pollution problem when diving in Greece, coming across more plastic bags than fish.”⁠[5][2][6]

The timeline published by The Ocean Cleanup states that in 2011 he devoted his high school science project to ocean plastic pollution. The VRT NWS article states that in this secondary-school project he examined whether plastic could be taken out of the sea without killing the animals swimming among it, and that the work received an award from Delft University of Technology in 2012.⁠[1][5]

In 2012 he enrolled in aerospace engineering at Delft University of Technology. The NBC News article states that he was a freshman in that program when he gave his TEDx talk in Delft; the VRT NWS article states that he put his studies on hold soon after starting them.⁠[1][2][5]

In October 2012, aged 18, he gave a talk at TEDxDelft presenting an initial plan to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.⁠[7][1][2]

The UN Environment Programme’s announcement of 2014 states that while still at secondary school he proposed using ocean currents and winds to gather floating plastic with solid barriers and move it to a central collection platform; the Bloomberg Businessweek article states that in high school he planned to anchor a large boom to the seabed, a design that proved unworkable and was replaced first by weighted sea anchors and then by a design driven by wind and waves.⁠[8][3]

The Bloomberg Businessweek article states that in his 2012 talk he claimed the garbage patch in the North Pacific could be completely cleaned up in five years; Kim Martini and Miriam Goldstein, in their review of 2014, write that for the first draft of the project he claimed the design could clean the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre of plastic in ten years.⁠[3][9]

The VRT NWS article states that the video of the talk went viral in the spring of 2013, half a year after it was recorded. The UN Environment Programme’s announcement of 2014 gives its views as more than 1.6 million; the NBC News article of June 2018 gives more than 2 million, and the Bloomberg Businessweek article of 2018 about 2.8 million on YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry.⁠[5][8][2][3]

In 2013 he dropped out of university and founded The Ocean Cleanup as a non-profit organization, which he has led as chief executive since. The Ocean Cleanup’s official biography states that he started it armed with only €300 of saved-up pocket money; the organization’s release of 2017 states that he was 18 when he founded it.⁠[1][10]

The NBC News article states that he felt he could not continue in academia while pursuing the ocean cleanup and so left his studies to focus on the project; he said that his first funding round, of 90,000 euros, was harder to raise than the last round, of 20 million. The Outside article states that his first crowdfunding campaign, which followed his viral TED talk, raised $80,000 in 15 days.⁠[2][4]

On June 3, 2014, The Ocean Cleanup released its feasibility study in New York. The release describes a 530-page report, reviewed by scientific peers and produced over more than a year by an international team of over 100 experts, predominantly volunteers, covering engineering, oceanography, ecology, maritime law, finance and recycling; it concluded that the concept was a technically and financially viable way to clean plastic from the oceans and that ten years of deployment could remove almost half of the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The organization sought $2 million for the next phase of up-scaling tests and a large-scale operational pilot.⁠[6]

In the release he said: “Although a cleanup will have a profound effect, it is just part of the solution.” The VRT NWS article states that he was 19 when the project was presented at a conference in New York. A release of September that year describes the report as 530 pages by 70 scientists and engineers, while the review by Kim Martini and Miriam Goldstein gives it as 528 pages.⁠[6][5][11][9]

On September 15, 2014, The Ocean Cleanup announced in Amsterdam the end of its crowdfunding campaign: over 100 days more than 38,000 funders from 160 countries contributed, the $2 million target was reached within 98 days, and the final total was $2,154,282. ABN AMRO’s SEEDS, which facilitated the campaign, called it “the most successful non-profit crowdfunding campaign in history.” The money was to fund a series of up-scaling tests toward a fully operational offshore cleanup array within three years.⁠[11]

In the release he said that the next phase would “push the concept from feasible to executable,” and thanked supporters and volunteers for giving the team “the confidence to keep going.” The Outside article states that this campaign raised $2.1 million from 38,000 donors, including $600,000 from the Dutch government.⁠[11][4]

On November 7, 2014, the United NationsUnited NationsThe United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945 under the Charter of the United Nations. It has 193 Member States, and its headquarters are in New York City.Open the full entry Environment Programme announced in Nairobi, Kenya, the winners of that year’s Champions of the Earth award in five categories; he won in the category “inspiration and action.” At 19 he was the youngest winner ever of this flagship UN environmental award. The ceremony was set for November 19 at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington, where the winners were to be honoured by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner. Achim Steiner said in the announcement: “Boyan Slat is inspiring people, organizations and governments.”⁠[8]

The announcement adds that Intel EYE50 had named him one of the 20 Most Promising Young Entrepreneurs Worldwide.⁠[8]

The Ocean Cleanup’s milestones page states that in 2015 the organization carried out a “Mega Expedition” with 30 vessels, producing the first high-resolution map of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and ran scale-model tests measuring the loads, dynamics and cleanup efficiency of the floating barrier; data from several expeditions in 2013–2015 showed that most plastic is within reach of the surface. In 2015–2016 the organization developed the idea of combining the cleanup of legacy ocean plastic with stopping plastic in rivers, the concept behind the Interceptor.⁠[12]

On May 20, 2015, at the Seoul Digital Forum in South Korea, he announced, aged 20, that the first passive ocean cleanup system was to be deployed in the second quarter of 2016, with waters off Tsushima, an island between Japan and South Korea, under feasibility research as the site. The release states that the system would span 2,000 meters, surpassing the 1,000-meter Tokyo Mega-Float as the longest floating structure ever deployed in the ocean, and would operate for at least two years, intercepting plastic before it reached Tsushima’s shores; about one cubic meter of pollution per person washes up on Tsushima each year, and the local government was assessing whether the collected plastic could serve as an alternative energy source. He said: “This deployment will enable us to study the system’s efficiency and durability over time.”⁠[13]

The release adds that within five years, after deployments of increasing scale, the organization planned a 100-kilometer system to clean up about half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, between HawaiiHawaiiHawaii is a U.S. state consisting of a group of volcanic islands in the central Pacific Ocean; its capital is Honolulu, on the island of Oʻahu. Hawaii was admitted to the Union on August 21, 1959, as the 50th state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 1,455,271.Open the full entry and CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry.⁠[13]

On June 21, 2016, the Thiel Foundation announced that it had accepted 29 new members into the 2016 class of Thiel Fellows, chosen from more than 6,000 applications from around the world, and he was among them, selected for the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry; the announcement describes the fellowship as providing young people with $100,000 to learn by doing rather than by following conventional paths like college. It lists him as from Delft, the Netherlands, working on environmental technology with The Ocean Cleanup, states that he founded and runs this non-profit developing technologies to rid the world’s oceans of plastic, and says that by leveraging ocean currents to concentrate and extract plastic waste it is “orders of magnitude more efficient” than traditional approaches that rely on boats and nets.⁠[14]

An NBC News article of 2018 likewise states that Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry’s foundation named him a Thiel Fellow, a program that begins with a $100,000 grant; a Bloomberg Businessweek article of 2018 on The Ocean Cleanup is headlined “This Thiel-Backed Startup ….”⁠[2][3]

On June 22, 2016, The Ocean Cleanup unveiled its North Sea prototype in The Hague, the first ocean cleanup system to be tested at sea: a 100-meter floating barrier segment to be installed in the North Sea 23 kilometers (12 nautical miles) off the Dutch coast for one year, with sensors tracking its motion and loads, to test whether it could withstand the extreme weather it would face in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch; collecting plastic was not the test’s objective. The Dutch government and Royal Boskalis Westminster N.V. were represented at the unveiling.⁠[15]

In the release he said: “This is a historic day on the path toward clean oceans.” He also said: “I estimate there is a 30% chance the system will break, but either way it will be a good test.” The Dutch Environment Minister, Sharon Dijksma, called The Ocean Cleanup in the release an “inspiring example” of how to tackle ocean pollution.⁠[15]

The Outside article of January 2017 states that three months after the prototype was moored in the North Sea, engineers detected damage from heavy wind and waves and it was pulled from the water for maintenance; he wrote on the organization’s website that when ideas are confronted with reality, “there will always be surprises.” A Gizmodo article of 2021 states that the 2016 prototype was promptly ripped apart by the water.⁠[4][16]

On May 3, 2017, The Ocean Cleanup announced in Delft that it had raised $21.7 million in donations since November 2016 to fund large-scale trials in the Pacific later that year, bringing its total funding since 2013 to $31.5 million. The round was led by the San Francisco philanthropists Marc BenioffMarc BenioffMarc Benioff is a technology entrepreneur and philanthropist who is co-founder, Chair, and CEO of Salesforce, as well as owner and co-chair of TIME. He worked at Oracle early in his career, co-founded Salesforce in 1999, championed cloud-based customer relationship management and the subscription model for enterprise software, and advocated for companies to take part in community philanthropy. In recent years, he has led the company toward AI agents and enterprise data platforms.Open the full entry and Lynne Benioff and an anonymous donor, with other supporters including the Julius Baer Foundation, Royal DSM and Peter Thiel. The release states that the organization then employed about 65 engineers and researchers and was headquartered in Delft.⁠[10]

In the release he said: “Our mission is to rid the world’s oceans of plastic,” adding that the day the first batch of plastic would be returned to shore “is now in sight.” Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce, said in the release: “Lynne and I are thrilled to support The Ocean Cleanup’s important goal of eliminating plastic in our oceans.”⁠[10]

On May 11, 2017, at the Werkspoorkathedraal in Utrecht, he presented a new design to a live audience of thousands of supporters and a large group of followers online (the organization’s release of May 3 had announced 3,000 supporters for the event) and unveiled four 12-meter (40-foot) high anchor components. The release explains that the earlier concept had fixed floating screens to the seabed at great depths, whereas the new design was a modular, drifting system: sea anchors made the U-shaped screens move more slowly than the plastic, which drifted in, was concentrated at a central point and shipped to shore for recycling. On that basis the organization announced that it would begin extracting plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch within 12 months, with the first system deployed in the first half of 2018, “two years ahead of schedule,” and, on the basis of computer models, that the fleet could clean up half of the patch in five years.⁠[17][10]

At the event he said: “The cleanup of the world’s oceans is just around the corner.”⁠[17]

An NBC News article of June 13, 2018, states that he had raised more than $40 million for his startup and assembled an engineering-heavy staff of 70; that deploying 60 systems in a remote area between Hawaii and California would require a total of $360 million, at an estimated cost of nearly $6 million per screen; and that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tweeted his interest in the cleanup and later became one of its biggest backers. A VRT NWS article of 2018 gives his organization about 75 employees, and a Bloomberg Businessweek article of 2018 states that he had raised more than $30 million and had more than 80 employees, with backers including Marc Benioff and the Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, and mentions Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo as supporters.⁠[2][5][3]

On September 8, 2018, the first ocean cleanup system, System 001, set out from San Francisco Bay, towed by the Maersk Launcher, provided by A.P. Moller-Maersk, first for a two-week trial 240 nautical miles offshore and then to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, 1,200 nautical miles offshore between Hawaii and California. The release describes a U-shaped floating barrier 600 meters (2,000 feet) long with a skirt reaching 3 meters below the surface, moved by wind and waves to funnel plastic toward its center and fitted with solar-powered, satellite-connected sensors and cameras; the organization then had about 80 engineers and researchers and was headquartered in Rotterdam.⁠[18]

The release expected the first plastic to return to land within six months of deployment; if funding allowed, the organization planned to scale up to about 60 systems in the patch within two years, remove half of its plastic within five years and reduce ocean plastic by at least 90% by 2040. He said that if the technology worked, “the cleanup will happen.” A photo caption in the Bloomberg Businessweek article dates the installation of System 001 at the Pacific trial test site to September 15, 2018.⁠[18][3]

An NPR story of January 5, 2019, states that a 60-foot (about 18-meter) end section of System 001 had broken off the week before because of an issue with the material used to build it; he called it “just normal wear and tear,” not the result of a major Pacific storm. The system had also occasionally let plastic drift out of its U-shaped funnel, which the team attributed to the system moving too slowly, at an average of about four inches per second. The team was bringing the system back to Hawaii for repairs and upgrades. The Ocean Cleanup’s milestones page states that after four months offshore System 001 returned to port so that the team could analyze the problems it had encountered.⁠[19][12]

In the NPR interview he said: “In principle, I think we are relatively close to getting it working,” and called the problems “quite solvable.” NPR gives an estimated cost of $24.6 million for the system, a figure it attributes to ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry; a Gizmodo article of 2021 describes System 001 as a $20 million U-shaped boom. TIMETIMETIME is an American newsmagazine and media brand founded by Henry Luce and Briton Hadden, which published its first issue on March 3, 1923; it is headquartered in New York and known for its Person of the Year selection and the TIME100 list. Since 2018 it has been personally owned by Marc and Lynne Benioff; its current Chief Executive Officer is Jessica Sibley, and its Editor-in-Chief is Sam Jacobs.Open the full entry wrote in 2024 that this first full-scale cleanup system, launched in 2018, did not effectively capture plastic and eventually broke; he said: “That was very annoying, but again, we learned a lot from that.”⁠[19][16][20]

On October 2, 2019, The Ocean Cleanup announced in Rotterdam that System 001/B, its second prototype, launched from Vancouver in June 2019, had caught plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, including visible plastic debris, large “ghost nets” from commercial fishing and microplastics as small as 1 millimeter, a catch by which, the release says, the team was “pleasantly surprised.” The team had fitted a parachute sea anchor to slow the system so that faster-moving plastic could float in, and enlarged the cork line while offshore to stop plastic spilling over the top.⁠[7]

In the release he said that a year of testing in “the unforgivable environment of the high seas” was a strong sign that the vision was attainable and that the mission to remove decades of accumulated plastic was “within our sights.” The release names the next step as designing System 002, a full-scale system able to endure conditions and retain plastic over long periods; the organization then had about 90 engineers and researchers.⁠[7]

On October 26, 2019, at a live-streamed event in the Port of Rotterdam, he unveiled Interceptor 004 and the organization’s plan for rivers. The release describes the Interceptor as fully solar-powered with lithium-ion batteries that let it run day and night, anchored to the riverbed and using the river’s flow and a partial floating barrier to guide debris into the system, rated at about 50,000 kilograms of trash a day and up to 100,000 kilograms under optimized conditions. Four units had been built: two were operating, in Jakarta and in Klang, Malaysia, the other two were planned for Can Tho in Vietnam and Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, and Thailand and Los Angeles County in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry had signed or were close to agreements.⁠[21]

The release states that the organization’s research found that 1,000 of the world’s roughly 100,000 rivers, about 1%, carry around 80% of the trash entering the oceans, and set the goal of tackling these 1,000 most polluting rivers before the end of 2025. He said: “To truly rid the oceans of plastic, we need to both clean up the legacy and close the tap.”⁠[21]

He received the 2020 FPdGi International Award of the Princess of Girona Foundation. The foundation’s award page credits him with tackling global environmental problems posed by plastic pollution in oceans and rivers through innovation, entrepreneurship and a constant pursuit of technological solutions; it also notes that the oceanographers Kim Martini and Miriam Goldstein made a technical analysis of the 2014 feasibility study.⁠[22]

On October 24, 2020, The Ocean Cleanup launched in Rotterdam its first product made from ocean plastic, a pair of sunglasses. The frames use plastic from the first catch of System 001/B in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, returned to shore in December 2019 and certified under DNV GL’s public traceability standard, and the case uses recycled material from System 001, nicknamed “Wilson.” The sunglasses were designed by Yves Béhar and his team at fuseproject in California and made in Italy by Safilo, for a contribution of 199 euros or dollars, with all proceeds going to the next cleanup operations; the organization estimated that each pair would fund the cleanup of an area of the patch equal to 24 football fields.⁠[23]

In the release he said: “It’s incredible to think that only a year ago this plastic was polluting our oceans.”⁠[23]

On June 2, 2021, The Ocean Cleanup and The Coca-Cola CompanyThe Coca-Cola CompanyThe Coca-Cola Company is an Atlanta-based beverage company whose products are sold in more than 200 countries and territories. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.Open the full entry announced a partnership making Coca-Cola a “Global Implementation Partner” of the river project, which the release calls the first partnership of its kind. Drawing on its operations in more than 200 countries and territories, the company was to support on-the-ground community engagement for new Interceptor deployments, help process the collected plastic and help find new partners and investment. The two planned to deploy cleanup systems in fifteen rivers around the world over the next 18 months: Interceptors were already installed in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic and Can Tho in Vietnam, with thirteen more rivers planned. In the release he said: “I applaud them for being the first in the industry to join our mission.”⁠[24]

On October 20, 2021, as System 002, nicknamed “Jenny,” returned to Victoria Harbour in Canada, The Ocean Cleanup announced that its technology had been proven. The release states that System 002 completed nine test extractions in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, removing 28,659 kilograms of plastic in all and up to 9,014 kilograms in a single haul, including toilet seats, toothbrushes, laundry baskets, shoes, crates and discarded fishing gear, with the plastic tracked and verified by the certification body DNV; the next system, System 03, 2.5 kilometers long and about three times the size of System 002, was to be the blueprint for a fleet, and ten such systems were expected to remove 50% of the patch every five years. The organization then had about 100 employees.⁠[25]

In the release he called the result “proof that cleanup is possible” and said: “these kilograms are the most important ones we will ever collect.” A Gizmodo article published the day before the announcement states that the organization’s own impact assessment projected that the system would catch at least tens of thousands of animals a day even at its slowest speed, and that, the Maersk ships towing the system having a hefty carbon footprint, the organization had said it was looking into buying carbon offsets for the systems.⁠[25][16]

On October 29, 2021, the YouTube creators MrBeastMrBeastMrBeast, born James Stephen Donaldson and commonly known as Jimmy Donaldson, is an American video creator, television producer and entrepreneur. He began running a YouTube channel in 2012, later founded Beast Industries and the snack brand Feastables, and launched several charitable fundraising campaigns. In June 2026, his main channel became the first individual creator’s YouTube channel to reach 500 million subscribers.Open the full entry and Mark Rober launched the #TeamSeas fundraiser, aiming to raise $30 million to remove 30 million pounds of trash from oceans, rivers and beaches at $1 per pound, with donations split equally between The Ocean Cleanup and Ocean Conservancy; The Ocean Cleanup’s share went to its Interceptor river work. In July 2024 The Ocean Cleanup announced the campaign’s conclusion: more than 600,000 people had donated and over 34 million pounds of waste had been removed; $1 of donations was unlocked for every pound of river trash the organization extracted and verified, with the money used for interception in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Jamaica and Malaysia.⁠[26][27]

On April 27, 2022, he and Ho Sung Song, president and CEO of Kia Corporation, signed a seven-year global partnership at Kia’s headquarters in Seoul. Kia was to provide financial contributions and in-kind supplies for ocean operations and the construction of Interceptors, along with four electric vehicles, one EV6 and three Niro EVs, for The Ocean Cleanup’s headquarters in the Netherlands; The Ocean Cleanup was to supply usable fractions of the plastic it collected, together with research results and data. In the release he said: “Plastic is not inherently a bad material, but we must use it responsibly.”⁠[28]

On February 3, 2023, The Ocean Cleanup announced a gift of $25 million from the Airbnb co-founder Joe GebbiaJoe GebbiaJoe Gebbia is an American designer and entrepreneur and a co-founder of Airbnb. In 2007, he and Brian Chesky founded AirBed & Breakfast, the predecessor of Airbnb; in 2022, he stepped down from his full-time operating role at Airbnb and joined Tesla’s board; since 2025, he has served as U.S. Chief Design Officer, leading the White House’s National Design Studio.Open the full entry, the largest private donation it had received, to support its work on oceans, rivers, recycling and research, and in particular the launch of System 03 in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch later that year. The release states that System 002, deployed since late 2021, had removed close to 200,000 kilograms of plastic, and that Interceptors deployed or in trials in eight countries had caught more than 2 million kilograms of river trash; the organization then had 145 employees. He said: “Joe’s continued support of The Ocean Cleanup’s mission has a direct impact on our operations all over the world.”⁠[29]

An NL Times story of October 9, 2023, states that System 03 was first deployed at the end of August 2023 and that its first trip collected about 46,000 kilograms of plastic in five extractions, the largest single load being 18 tons; its wings reach four meters deep, one meter deeper than on System 002, and it tested an enlarged retention zone, more interior cameras, a new method of hunting plastic hotspots and a marine-animal safety hatch that can be opened to release trapped animals. The Ocean Cleanup’s milestones page describes System 03 as nearly three times larger than the previous technology, able to clean an area the size of a football field every five seconds.⁠[30][12]

In 2024 he was nominated by Lindsey P. Horvath for the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award of the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.⁠[31]

On May 29, 2024, The Ocean Cleanup live-streamed its 100th extraction of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. That year, recovered plastic went into two partner products: a trunk liner for the Kia EV3 made from garbage patch plastic, and a limited-edition Coldplay LP made from plastic intercepted in the Rio Las Vacas near Guatemala City.⁠[12]

On September 6, 2024, The Ocean Cleanup announced in San Francisco that at its current level of performance the Great Pacific Garbage Patch could be eliminated in ten years for $7.5 billion, and that its data and modeling indicated it might be done in five years for $4 billion; three years of extraction had removed more than one million pounds of trash from the patch, about 0.5% of the accumulated total. The organization announced that it would pause extraction for one year in 2025 to map hotspots of intense plastic accumulation. As of August 2024 it had collected more than 16 million kilograms of trash from aquatic ecosystems worldwide. He said: “The only missing thing is who will ensure this job gets done.”⁠[32]

On November 12, 2024, TIME named him to its TIME100 Climate list for 2024. TIME’s profile states that river interception devices, together with ships towing a large net through ocean garbage patches, had removed over 19,000 tons of plastic since 2019; he said the goal could be reached sooner: “I believe we can do it faster.” Of the one-year pause of sea operations in 2025 he said: “We’re going to invest one year to save five,” and “The broom is ready. Now it’s about knowing where to sweep.” TIME disclosed in the profile that donors to The Ocean Cleanup include its co-chairs and owners, Marc Benioff and Lynne Benioff.⁠[20]

On March 9, 2026, The Ocean Cleanup announced that it was one of ten organizations in the 2025 cohort of the Audacious Project, housed at TED, whose donor community had committed $121 million to the 30 Cities Program, which the release calls the organization’s largest single donation. Launched at the UN Ocean Conference in Nice in 2025 and estimated to cost $350 million, the program aims to cut up to one third of river plastic emissions to the ocean by 2030 by deploying Interceptors in 30 high-polluting urban centers; deployments were planned for 2026 in nine places: Barranquilla in Colombia, Santo Domingo, Mumbai, Jakarta, Denpasar, Tasikmalaya, Kuala Lumpur, Panama City and the Manila Bay Region. The Audacious funders named in the release include ELMA Philanthropies, Emerson CollectiveEmerson CollectiveEmerson Collective is an investment and philanthropic organization founded by Laurene Powell Jobs and headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Structured as a limited liability company, it supports businesses and nonprofits through venture investments, grants and collaborative programs in education, economic mobility, immigration, the environment, health and media.Open the full entry, MacKenzie Scott, Pivotal Ventures, Reed HastingsReed HastingsReed Hastings is an entrepreneur who co-founded Netflix with Marc Randolph in 1997 and led it as CEO for more than 25 years before serving as executive chairman from 2023 to 2026. Since 2025 he has been a director of Anthropic.Open the full entry and Patty Quillin, the Skoll Foundation and the Valhalla Foundation.⁠[33]

He said: “The 30 Cities Program is a culmination of over a decade of research and operations in the ocean and rivers.” The release states that as of February 2026 the organization had collected more than 47 million kilograms of trash from aquatic ecosystems and had about 200 employees and operations in 10 countries; its milestones page states that its global operations reached 50 million kilograms of captured trash in March 2026.⁠[33][12]

As of November 2026 The Ocean Cleanup’s official biography lists him as founder and CEO and states that the non-profit “aims to put itself out of business,” with the goal of removing 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040. The biography states that the organization is headquartered in Rotterdam with more than 120 employees from more than 30 countries, and that he has co-authored around a dozen scientific papers and holds multiple patents. The milestones page states that as of May 2025 there were 20 Interceptor deployments in nine countries, and that by 2026 the organization had authored or co-authored more than 100 scientific papers.⁠[1][12]

A VRT NWS article of September 8, 2018, quotes the weekly Elsevier Weekblad on him, “Met zijn onverschrokken aanpak overwon hij tal van tegenslagen” (with his fearless approach he overcame numerous setbacks), and states that the weekly had named him “Nederlander van het Jaar” (Dutchman of the Year) the year before (“vorig jaar”).⁠[5]

The NBC News article of 2018 states that he has lunched with the king and queen of Holland and has won “praise from kings and prime ministers, rock stars and the United Nations.”⁠[2]

A Bloomberg Businessweek article of 2018 states that the marine biologist Miriam Goldstein, who had led an expedition to study plastic pollution in the North Pacific patch, noted on an academic email chain in 2013 that the device had little chance of working: it would have to be “impractically large,” would likely fail to collect plastic in strong winds or waves, and would need mooring cables about twice as deep as the deepest on record. The article states that his response, a 535-page feasibility study, was “strikingly technical” but left Miriam Goldstein and Kim Martini with a lot of new questions.⁠[3]

On July 14, 2014, the physical oceanographer Kim Martini and the biological oceanographer Miriam Goldstein published a technical review of the feasibility study on Deep Sea News. They credited the organization with sincerely wanting to help the ocean and praised the chapter on boom capture efficiency as carefully done, but concluded that the report “has not proven that the Ocean Cleanup as currently described is feasible”: setting engineering limits by average rather than extreme current speeds left the moored array “under-engineered and likely to fail”; the pilot sampling of only the upper 5 meters could not support the conclusion that most plastic lies in the top 3 meters; and the treatment of biofouling, structural loads, deployment and bycatch was inadequate.⁠[9]

In a note to the review, Miriam Goldstein relates that before the feasibility study was released he had asked her to review the physical oceanography chapter, but the required two-week turnaround for a 50-page chapter was not feasible for her, and the other scientists she contacted also declined, feeling that their substantive comments could not be incorporated before release; Peter Franks of Scripps offered to organize Scripps faculty to review the study if it were presented in a 15-page format, and she writes: “The Ocean Cleanup did not respond to this offer.” The review also states: “He has also indicated that he is open to serious critiques of the feasibility study.”⁠[9]

A Bloomberg Businessweek article of 2018 quotes Kim Martini, then an oceanography postdoc at the University of Alaska Fairbanks: “People think that it’s an easy, sexy solution, but it’s not.” She said that the study “wasn’t actually peer-reviewed, and that’s a big red flag,” and warned: “If it breaks, it’s a giant piece of marine debris.” The Ocean Cleanup’s release of 2014 describes the report as reviewed by scientific peers.⁠[3][6]

The Outside article of 2017 states that Marcus Eriksen, co-founder of the 5 Gyres Institute, a Culver City, California, nonprofit, says The Ocean Cleanup “could do more harm than good, diverting resources from efforts to keep plastics out of the ocean in the first place”; calling ocean plastic “a plastic smog,” he says that “just cleaning it up is not a viable solution,” and wants money and effort directed to policy rather than what he calls “pie-in-the-sky innovation.” The article quotes his answer to critics: “The way you advance a technological society is to try things,” and quotes him: “Even if we stopped producing plastics today, ocean-born microplastics will still increase twentyfold or more.”⁠[4]

The Bloomberg Businessweek article of 2018 states that the Simon Fraser University marine biologist David Shiffman surveyed 15 ocean-plastics experts around the world that June and that none unreservedly supported the project, five calling it “a very bad idea with little or no redeeming value”; and that Charles Moore, the researcher who first identified a garbage patch in the northern Pacific, said trying to clean one up would bankrupt any country that attempted it. The article also states that the system en route to the Pacific patch was unlikely to stay there, because objects that float high in the water, unlike submerged flotsam, tend to be driven clear by the wind; the University of Hawaii ocean researcher Nikolai Maximenko says: “This is why submerged microplastics and fishing nets gather in the garbage patch.” In reply, the organization’s spokesman Joost Dubois says it expects the offshore supply ship hauling System 001 to be able to pull it back on course as needed.⁠[3]

The NBC News article of 2018 states that George Leonard, chief scientist of Ocean Conservancy, said “we are not at all convinced this is going to work” and that “This has got to be resolved on land, rather than in the water.” NOAA’s Marine Debris Program says the pollution is located not only at the surface but throughout the water column and down to the ocean floor; The Ocean Cleanup’s researchers replied that their aerial and shipboard studies in the Pacific had shown that the majority of the plastic pollution lies near the surface, where the device can scoop it up. Rick Spinrad, a former chief scientist of NOAA and later a professor at Oregon State University, first found the project “big, brazen and bound to struggle,” but later said that “the more I dove in and got more and more detail, the more I changed my mind,” and “That is why I am convinced they are going to have some success,” how much remaining to be seen. The NPR story of 2019 states that George Leonard says “only 3 to 5 percent of the total amount of ocean plastic actually winds up in systems of circulating currents” and estimates that about 8 million metric tons of plastic enter the ocean each year.⁠[2][19]

The Bloomberg Businessweek article of 2018 states that CSA Ocean Sciences Inc., a marine environmental consulting firm the organization hired to assess its prototype, found in a report published earlier that year a significant risk of environmental harm if the system went astray and could not be recovered, but concluded that the potential benefit outweighed that risk; the organization’s spokesman Joost Dubois admits that “it’s clear that the problem is much bigger than what we’re able to solve,” and, the article states, acknowledges that virtually all the benefit would come from the difficult work of keeping plastic out of the ocean in the first place.⁠[3]

On January 22, 2019, Rebecca Helm published an opinion piece in The Atlantic, originally titled “The Ocean Cleanup Project Could Destroy the Neuston,” arguing that the cleanup system could harm the neuston, the organisms living at the sea surface; a Gizmodo article of 2021 describes her as a jellyfish expert and assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. On February 6 he replied on The Ocean Cleanup’s website as CEO and founder: the environmental impact assessment had considered surface species including Velella velella; these species range over more than 300 million square kilometers, while the deployment area was under 500,000 square kilometers, about 1% of that zone, and some of them have a high reproduction rate; and Professor Gerhard J. Herndl of the Vienna University, a member of the organization’s Scientific Advisory Board, judged that other stressors, such as high turbulence fragmenting these fragile organisms during storms, cause far greater losses than the cleanup would. He wrote: “based on the available data, we have not found any evidence that supports the idea that the neuston are at risk because of our efforts,” and committed to a new impact assessment for a fleet of systems before any scale-up.⁠[34][16]

On February 13 Rebecca Helm wrote again, on Deep Sea News, calling the reply “profoundly dismissive, not only of me, but of the scientific evidence.” She writes that “neuston are not ubiquitous”; that two species of blue sea dragon, described only in 2014, are found only in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, yet neither his impact assessment nor his reply mentions these two species found only in his deployment area; that the same physical forces that concentrate plastic may concentrate neuston where The Ocean Cleanup wants to work; and that “The Ocean Cleanup’s proposed fleet of 60 systems in the open ocean are not storms. They are intended to be at sea for years.”⁠[35]

A Gizmodo article of October 2021 quotes Miriam Goldstein, who holds a Ph.D. in biological oceanography and was by then director of ocean policy at the Center for American Progress, on System 002: “They spent I don’t know how many tens of millions of dollars to invent fishing.” She also said: “There’s no yes or no answer to whether this is good or bad—it’s just a benefit-risk tradeoff.” Rebecca Helm said: “Cleaning the Garbage Patches is like trying to heal a wound by cleaning blood off the floor.” The article states that a peer-reviewed study sponsored by the organization tentatively contradicts some of Rebecca Helm’s claims but concludes that more observational data on neuston populations is needed, and that the organization’s rebuttal of her piece quoted Gerhard Herndl: “Most plankton and neuston organisms are adapted to high loss rates.” A press representative of the organization did not answer Gizmodo’s questions before the announcement and said: “In the past we had similar questions but all originated from the same source.”⁠[16]

The Bloomberg Businessweek article of 2018 states that he says the organization has conducted extensive modeling and prototype testing and that the outcry from his more credentialed peers just proves he is on to something; he says: “If you don’t have any critics, it means that what you’re doing is easy and obvious.” The NBC News article of 2018 states that he calls many of the concerns “outdated,” based on earlier designs that he says have been tossed aside after “hundreds of scale model tests and prototypes,” and quotes his answer to skeptics: “Human history is a long list of things that were impossible and then that were done.”⁠[3][2]

The Ocean Cleanup: Official website: https://theoceancleanup.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[36]