September 8, 2018
We finally did it! We launched System 1 earlier today and it has been a success so far. It was so exciting to get this new program underway. It all started back when I was 16, I dived into the waters of Greece expecting to see wonderful species of fish, but what I actually got, was plastic and pollution. I needed to do something about it, so I came up with a design that would suck in the pollution and leave the ecosystems alone. The scientists doubted me, but I started the Ocean Cleanup and here we are. Proving the scientists wrong. I will go into more detail when our celebrations are over.
September 9, 2018
It all started when I was scuba diving in Greece and was surprised to see more plastic than fish. What surprised me even more, after digging deeper into the plastic pollution problem, was no one had made serious attempts to combat this issue. The question “Why don’t we just clean it up?” lingered in my mind, and led me to devote my high school science project to understanding the problem, as well as researching why a cleanup had been considered impossible.
It became clear that a cleanup using vessels and nets would take around 79,000 years, cost tens of billions of dollars, be harmful to sea life and lead to large amounts of carbon emissions.
There are 5 major plastic accumulation zones in the world where ocean currents converge. These accumulation zones are commonly called “garbage patches”. The vast majority of ocean plastic will not go away by itself but instead slowly break down into microplastics. After a year of experimenting with ideas and simple tests, I came up with the idea to develop a passive concentration system. I envisioned to use the ocean currents to my advantage, and let them be the driving force behind catching and concentrating the plastic. Instead of going after the plastic, we could let the plastic come to us.
Initially, my idea did not gain traction. I had just started studying Aerospace Engineering but continued working out my concept as well. After 6 months, I decided to quit my studies and found The Ocean Cleanup, with just 300 euros of savings as a starting point.
Then one night in March 2013, things changed. The TEDx video I had presented was picked up by several news sites, from which it spread to hundreds of thousands of people. The idea went viral. In a matter of days, it allowed The Ocean Cleanup to recruit our initial team, as well as raise our first 90,000 USD using crowdfunding. And so, The Ocean Cleanup project took off.
June 27, 2019
It has been a while since I wrote in this diary, but the crew have been designing system 001 B, which we are launching soon. We learned many important lessons from System 001, and it is fascinating to see how far we've come in such a short period of time. I can't wait for the launch and to see how the newer verion will work. From system 001, all the way to where we are now. We have also started researching about where the plastic comes from, and we have discovered it comes from rivers. So we have started designing what we are going to call the Interceptor. It not only has been very good for the environment, but it has also been a lot of fun doing all these experiments and inventing new machines.
October 28, 2019
By mid-2018, after digesting all the lessons learned from the testing phase of Interceptor 1.0 in Zuidland and taking into account all the findings from our river research, our engineers started designing a new concept and basic design for our Interceptor 2.0.
The many lessons learned from Interceptor 1.0 required a new approach in the design of Interceptor 2.0. Changes were made to focus on capacity and operational cost. The biggest of these changes were replacing the big bags used for storing debris with containers, which eliminated the carousel element used for distributing the debris to the bags. Instead, a shuttle conveyor was designed to distribute the catch over all the containers. We also enlarged the capacity of the system to enable more debris to be extracted, the conveyor belt was made 1.5 times bigger, and the storage capacity increased six-fold. Other changes included, improving stability and locking mooring resistance to ensure the system remained in the correct position at all times.
Similarly to our ocean cleanup design, we believe simplicity is key for operations and mass production. At this point, we knew we were aiming for a design suited for series production, that could be utilized in rivers and countries all over the world, we made these changes with a focus on improving the general ease of use and cost of operations.