Boyan Slat's Ocean Cleanup Reveals its New River-Cleaning 'Interceptor' Device

What you're seeing behind me is what we call the interceptor, which is the first scalable solution to catching plastic in rivers before it reaches the oceans. What we found is that 1,000 rivers are responsible for 80% of the pollution. The way it works is that the plastic arrives from this side, so the river flows and brings the plastic to the front of the machine. Then you see a barrier that guides the plastic to the mouth of the interceptor, where there's this conveyor belt that then scoops it out of the water and then distributes the plastic across six giant dumpsters. With it, we can collect about 120,000 pounds of trash that each of these machines can collect every day. It's not a prototype. This is actually one out of four machines that already exist in the world, two of whom are already deployed and actively cleaning plastic from rivers. I couldn't have imagined a much worse start of the year. Our big device in the middle of the ocean broke down. We had to bring it back to shore, but we took all those lessons. We rapidly adjusted the system. We launched again in June, and really earlier this month, we announced that we now actually have a working system in the ocean. We now have a system that's catching plastic. I think we now have, for the first time ever, we have all the tools we need to solve this problem. There's really no excuse to not clean the oceans now. The goal is to have fleets of ocean systems in all the five ocean garbage patches, as well as having interception devices in the 1,000 most polluting rivers in the world. I fully agree it's a crazy ambition, but I can't think of any faster or easier way to solve this problem.