Ocean Cleanup Project

The Ocean Cleanup

Donation address (PND) PSECCwBvFKCm9WtzDnWVfALgGSgbx2xHAf

Who they are

The Ocean Cleanup is a Dutch non-profit engineering organisation, founded in 2013 by Boyan Slat when he was 18. Their mission is simple and enormous: rid the world's oceans of plastic. They approach it with hard engineering instead of slogans — building, deploying, and iterating actual hardware at sea and in rivers.

How it works

Ocean garbage patches are vast and dispersed

The five main ocean gyres where plastic accumulates.

Most ocean plastic isn't floating right where you can reach it — it's smeared across millions of square kilometres of open ocean, concentrated in five rotating gyres. The largest, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is roughly three times the size of France.

Take advantage of natural oceanic forces

Instead of fighting the ocean, their systems use it. Long floating barriers, towed in a U-shape by two vessels, let wind and currents do the work of funnelling plastic into a retention zone for extraction — cheap on energy, gentle on marine life.

To catch the plastic, act like the plastic

Their models predict that a fully scaled deployment can cut the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by 50% in five years. More systems = more plastic pulled out.

Stopping plastic at the source: rivers

Interceptors — solar-powered river barges — catch plastic before it ever reaches the ocean. A handful of rivers carry the majority of the world's plastic into the sea, and Interceptors are now deployed across rivers in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, the United States, Thailand, Jamaica, and Guatemala.

Extract, ship, recycle

The plastic that comes back gets certified, processed, and turned into new products. Revenue from branded recycled-plastic goods feeds back into funding more cleanup — the goal is a self-sustaining system, not a perpetual donation cycle.

Why it fits Pandacoin

Plastic pollution is one of the clearest "everyone loses" environmental problems on the planet, and The Ocean Cleanup is one of the rare efforts actually moving the needle with measurable results. Supporting them is supporting real-world impact at ocean-scale.

Learn more

Visit theoceancleanup.com for their current deployments, live dashboards, and transparency reports.

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