The Ocean Cleanup's Interceptor targets the 1% of rivers responsible for 80% of ocean plastic — stopping pollution at its source. Deploying these machines across 1,000 rivers worldwide proves that scalable technology, paired with local partnerships, can rapidly close the tap on plastic reaching our seas.
[Music] at the cleanup our mission is to rid the world's oceans of plastic and part of that is to prevent more plastic from from reaching the oceans with our research we found that rivers are the the arteries that carry the plastic from land to sea and what we found is that just one percent of rivers is responsible for almost 80 percent of all the plastic going to the ocean so if we stop the plastic there we have a really good shot i think at rapidly stopping more plastic from going to the ocean [Music] so with our interceptors which we put into the mouth of the heaviest polluting rivers in the world we hope to catch the plastic before it becomes ocean plus now one percent of rivers sounds easy in a way it's good news but on the other hand it's still a thousand rivers so that's a large number and we want to do this in a matter of years so of course on one hand it's really important that we have solutions that are scalable that we can just build many of in in series because that's what's really ingrained in the philosophy of these interceptors but at the same time we've also come to learn that every river is different as one of my colleagues always likes to say if you've seen one river you've seen one river if you think about things like tidal differences current speeds the width of rivers the depth uh are there vessels or not what kind of vessel traffic do you have water hyacinths so these green plants like you see in this river or not so there's all these different variables and ultimately if we want to be effective at closing the tap we need to always be able to have an effective solution for every one of these 1000 rivers we need to have the right solution for the right river and that's why we have this portfolio of different kinds of interceptors where we can always choose the right solution for each of these different set of circumstances besides the interceptor original we also have the interceptor barriers combined with an interceptor tender which is a mobile solution so you can serve as different rivers [Music] for any river for any country where we need to deploy we need to set up consortia of partners to to make this a success so it needs government relations in terms of permitting et cetera you need an operator to to run these machines you need a waste management partner to make sure that the waste collected is properly disposed of so you can have this network of partners around it so helping to create a buzz in the country help to secure the right partners i think that can tremendously accelerate that process yeah to to really deploy interceptors at a high rate [Music] when i look at our team i see a group of people that is extremely dedicated and has this mindset of okay we might not have figured everything out but we'll find out along the way we'll learn by doing because ultimately these things may be difficult but the ocean doesn't care whether we find it difficult this needs to be done and eventually we'll find a way you