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Technology-based solutions could play a vital role in overcoming the plastic pollution crisis, and they are growing and changing all the time. The Ocean Cleanup, a Dutch environmental nonprofit, recently reached an important milestone: removing 100,000 kilograms of plastic from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the largest collection of marine debris in the world, located between California and Hawaii. Over the past year, the Ocean Cleanup team has used System 002 (nicknamed “Jenny”) to predict through computer modelling where large quantities of floating trash will accumulate and to then recover the plastic with the help of giant booms. There’s still a long way to go, as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is 1,000 times larger than the area of ocean cleared so far (it’s twice the size of Texas). But the plan is to launch System 003 soon: an engineering upgrade expected to remove ocean plastic potentially ten times faster than System 002. So the momentum is moving in the right direction 🙌