Safeguarding the planet

The Ocean Cleanup

The Ocean Cleanup is an international non-profit project with the mission of ridding the oceans of plastic. Trillions of pieces of plastic are afloat on our oceans today, with huge amounts more being added each year, largely from rivers. The Ocean Cleanup aims to achieve its mission using a dual strategy: cleaning up what has accumulated in the oceanic garbage patches, while intercepting plastic in rivers to prevent it from ever reaching the oceans.

 System 002, The Ocean Cleanup's latest technology in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, has removed hundreds of thousands of kilograms of plastic, and plans are in place to scale up to remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040. In rivers, The Ocean Cleanup's Interceptor program is active across the world, deploying a variety of plastic interception technologies to prevent plastic moving from rivers to oceans, with millions of kilograms already intercepted.

Since 2018, the Bennink Foundation has supported The Ocean Cleanup and its mission to rid the oceans of plastic with a focus on the design and engineering of cleanup and Interception technologies.