“We remain ambitious and optimistic, with significant progress made in both technology and scale,” adds Slat.
The plastic pollution crisis is one of the world’s most pressing environmental issues. Annual global plastic production has skyrocketed from 1.5 million metric tons in 1950, when the industry took off, up to 430 million tons in 2024. Much of that is not recycled or properly managed. In turn, every day, the equivalent of 2,000 garbage trucks full of plastic are dumped into the world’s oceans, rivers and lakes. And if current trends continue, global plastic waste is set to triple by 2060, with around half ending up in landfill and less than a fifth recycled, according to estimates by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
There is a clear consensus among leading plastic waste experts on the single best way to address this crisis: by reducing humanity’s jaw-dropping levels of plastic production.
“We have to focus on strategies to turn off the tap,” says Richard Thompson, a professor of marine biology and director of the Marine Institute at the University of Plymouth. “Preventing plastics from entering the environment simply has to be the priority, by far.”
Arturo Castillo, assistant professor of geosciences at Utrecht University and former leader of the Ocean Plastic Solutions Network at Imperial College London, agrees.
“For every euro that is not spent in prevention along the life cycle, the amount of plastic in the environment will also grow exponentially and it will always be a multiple of what you could have cleaned up with that same euro,” he argues.
But Thompson, who authored a 2024 report on the removal of plastics from aquatic environments for the Royal Society, the U.K.’s national academy of sciences, concedes that “some amount” of plastic removal will be necessary to reduce the risk of harm to wildlife, ecosystems and potentially humans. Plastic takes from 20 to 500 years to decompose, depending on the product — and even then only partially, into microplastics, which are harmful in different ways.
“There is a place for clean-up efforts always within a broader strategy, of which it needs to be a small part,” adds Castillo.
Slat, for his part, admits that “stopping plastic at the upstream source is essential.”
In order to maximize impact, The Ocean Cleanup carried out research into how and where plastics are entering the seas. A study, commissioned by the organization and published in the journal Science Advances in 2021, estimated that just 1,000 of the world’s three million rivers act as the pathway for 80 percent of plastics that reach the ocean.
Hence, its decision to deploy interceptors in rivers.