Milestones

The future

• Scale-up in Rivers

  Scale-up in Rivers

  Our goal is to apply our knowledge, experience, and network to eventually intercept plastic in the world’s 1000 most polluted rivers. This is how we plan to get there.

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The present

• 2025

  20 Interceptors in 9 countries

  20 Interceptors in 9 countries

  We currently operate in 9 different countries from Central America to Southeast Asia. Our Interceptor fleet counts 20 deployments as of May 2025.

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The past

• Mid-2018-Today

  Interceptor™ 2.0

  Interceptor™ 2.0

  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 second prototype, Interceptor™ 2.0.

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• October 2017-Today

  Interceptor 001 – The First River Technology

  Interceptor 001 – The First River Technology

  The first Interceptor™ prototype, The Ocean Cleanup’s initial river cleanup system, was designed and built in 2017. It was deployed and tested in Zuidland, South Holland, after which adjustments were made in Capelle a/d IJssel and Batam Indonesia during the first half of 2018, before being deployed in Jakarta in 2019. 

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• 2016 - Today

  River research projects

  River research projects

  Since the very start of our efforts we have always believed that to develop the most optimal cleanup technologies it’s essential to truly understand the problem. That is why we’ve been extensively researching rivers since 2016.

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• 2015-2016

  Developing the Interceptor™ Concept

  Developing the Interceptor™ Concept

  Ridding the oceans of plastic is our goal, and, to achieve this, we have always known that the solution is two pronged: cleaning up legacy ocean plastic and going after the source of the problem. The main source being plastic from rivers all around the globe entering the oceans and feeding the garbage patches we aretrying to eradicate.

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