From the article:

In a world where the scale of plastic pollution can feel overwhelming, 2025 brought a milestone worth celebrating: The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch nonprofit dedicated to removing plastic from marine environments, pulled more than 25 million kilograms of waste from global waters last year alone. That’s over 55 million pounds or about 2,000 garbage trucks’ worth of plastic that is no longer drifting through our oceans. The achievement brings their cumulative haul to more than 45 million kilos (99 million pounds) since operations began.

In addition to removing huge amounts of plastic waste from the ocean, Ocean Cleanup is also now focusing on devices to collect plastic trash from rivers.

A recent analysis by Ocean Cleanup found that 80% of ocean plastic comes from just 1,000 (1%) of rivers. Stopping plastic at the source so it never even gets to the ocean is significantly easier and cheaper--especially when there are a relatively small number of rivers to focus on for the biggest impact.

““The Great Pacific Garbage Patch can now be cleaned,” announced Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat, the wonderkid inventor who’s spent a decade inventing systems for waterborne litter collection.

Recent tests on his Ocean Cleanup rig called System 002, invented to tackle the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic pollution, were a success, leading Slat to predict that most of the oceanic garbage patches could be removed by 2040.

Intersections of ocean currents have created the massive floating islands of plastic trash—five slow-moving whirlpools that pull litter from thousands of miles away into a single radius.

The largest one sits between California and Hawaii, and 27-year-old Slat has been designing and testing his systems out there, launching from San Francisco since 2013.

GNN has reported on his original design for the floating device, but his engineering team improved upon it. System 002, nicknamed “Jenny,” successfully netted 9,000 kilograms, or around 20,000 pounds in its first trial.

It’s carbon-neutral, able to capture microplastics as small as 1 millimeter in diameter, and was designed to pose absolutely no threat to wildlife thanks to its wide capture area, slow motion, alerts, and camera monitors that allow operators to spy any overly-curious marine life...

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50 million kg of plastic removed from our oceans — but what actually happens to it? This video picks up where the last one left off, diving into the full lifecycle of ocean plastic after it's hauled onto the deck of System 03, The Ocean Cleanup's newest and most powerful barrier system. From sunglasses and Kia trunk liners to Coldplay vinyl pressed from river plastic, discover how recovered debris is being transformed into real products — and why much of it still can't be recycled at all. Then we go deeper: how AI-optimized routing boosted collection efficiency by over 60%, why the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is growing faster than it can be cleaned, and what the new 30 Cities program — backed by a record $121 million donation — means for the fight upstream. With plastic-eating bacteria emerging in oceans worldwide and System 03 shrinking the cleanup from hundreds of barriers to just 10, the tools are finally starting to match the ambition. Whether they'll be enough is the question the next decade will answer.

// Timestamps

0:00 - 50 Million kg

2:00 - Products

3:18 - River Plastic

4:54 - Is Any of This Making a Difference?

7:14 - AI and AWS

7:49 - Neuston

9:36 - 30 Cities Program

12:15 - Microplastic

14:44 - Why They Think They Can Win

// References

NORTH PACIFIC GYRE NOW WORKS AS A ISLAND, WHERE COASTAL SPECIES CAN THRIVE

Researchers have recently prove that the high seas are colonized by a diverse array of coastal species, which survive and reproduce in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a collection of floating marine debris in the North Pacific Ocean, in the open ocean.

Researchers examined 105 items of floating plastic items collected from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and identified 484 marine invertebrate organisms on the debris, accounting for 46 different species, of which 37 coastal were invertebrate species from coastal habitats, largely of Western Pacific origin. Most of these coastal species possessed either direct development or asexual reproduction, possibly facilitating long-term persistence on rafts. 

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is so huge that the findings suggest plastic pollution in the ocean might be enabling the creation of new floating ecosystems of species that are not normally able to survive in the open ocean. 

These emergent properties of plastic rafts may play an important role in sustaining diverse biofouling communities, but more research is needed to understand how such emergent properties may drive colonization, succession and trophic interactions of coastal and pelagic taxa associated with floating plastics.

Photo above: Floating plastic debris from the  the Eastern North Pacific Subtropical Gyre showing coastal organism living on. Photos courtesy of The Ocean Cleanup.

Photo below: Graphic  of the debris collection sites, illustrated as diamonds, in the Eastern North Pacific Ocean Subtropical Gyre. Model of the predicted concentration of debris, the more red, the most you could find marine debris.