A Gift Made in Your Honor

Welcome to The Ocean Cleanup

The gift of cleaner oceans

Someone who cares about you chose to support The Ocean Cleanup on your behalf — a gift that supports long-term efforts to rid the oceans of plastic.

Your name is now part of the cleanup — in rivers and at sea.

There’s nothing you need to do next — your impact is already underway.

If you’d like to follow the progress your gift helps make possible, you can sign up for our newsletter below. It’s an easy way to stay connected with our mission and see the difference you’re helping create.

We aim to clean up 90% of floating ocean plastic pollution by 2040

“When people say something is impossible, the sheer absoluteness of that statement should be a motivation to investigate further.”
Boyan Slat, Founder and CEO

Founded in 2013 by Boyan Slat, The Ocean Cleanup began as a bold idea: to develop technologies to rid the oceans of plastic.

What started with sketches and early prototypes has grown into a multidisciplinary team designing and deploying cleanup technologies in some of the world’s most polluted waters.

Boyan Slat got the idea to start The Ocean Cleanup after seeing more plastic than fish while diving in Greece

Over the past decade, we’ve tested, failed, redesigned, and tested again — each iteration bringing us closer to systems that reliably capture and remove floating plastic. Today, we are active in multiple countries around the world, and expanding steadily.

As our technology matured, so did our impact: for the last three consecutive years, we’ve doubled the amount of trash we remove annually. This acceleration is not luck — it’s the result of better designs, smarter deployments, improved modeling, and the experience gained from operating in real-world conditions.

Our approach is simple:

Follow the data to see where cleanup matters most
Build smarter solutions through testing and innovation
Deploy globally to turn ideas into real-world results

From a single idea to a worldwide effort, our mission has stayed the same: to rid the oceans of plastic. Once done, we can put ourselves out of business.

Each year, with more trash removed, more deployments, and lessons learned, we’re getting closer.

And none of it would be possible without people like you.